A Slow Descent or a Sudden Plunge?

I have not posted anything since March of this year. I have left it to other commentators more erudite, informed and skillful as wordsmiths than myself  to agonize over our situation.  I hope I am proven to be overly pessimistic. But however today's election turns out the overall dynamics that I see I believe will remain in force.

 November 6. 2018

Never in my life have I had more misgivings about the future. We seem to be doomed to bitter hard times whether it's an slow descent or a sudden heart stopping plunge.  Usually it's some poor souls somewhere else but eventually everyone's turn will come. Whether it is a climate change driven fire storm or an overheated ocean spurned Category 5 hurricane, or whether it's street fighters with bandannas covering their faces hurling rocks and bottles at police or a sudden bloody ring of carnage wrought by someone armed with an assault weapon and made crazy by hatred. Whatever it is some form of  historical (and preventable) calamity will eventually track us all down. Across the globe such events seem to be erupting daily usually in the form of tribal or religious warfare. And always they are underpinned by an ever sharpening divide in wealth inequality.

This divide between factions is becoming increasingly insurmountable with many countries pushing messy democratic norms aside in favor of autocracy and 'trains running on time 'type solutions. Everywhere it's the same story the few possessing impossibly vast stores of wealth use local religious theocrats in conjunction with home grown demagogues and/or corrupt pols to manipulate the uneducated and gullible to resist any reasonable and humane approach to what is essentially an economic problem. This while the planetary resources are being pushed to their breaking point as the natural environment is ravaged and consumed. Systematic unsustainability is ignored in a mad rush to feed capitalism's monstrous appetite for growth. The only future that novelists and screenwriters can can now imagine are dysotopian nightmares – either sterile, mind controlling Orwellian police states or Mad Max barbarism on a horizon of empty desolation and dead cities. But never mind that, for the oligarchic overlords and their well paid minions, science when it cannot be teased into profitable technology, is ignored even as the warning lights flash red. Obligatory formalized acknowledgement of the 'climate change' crisis and it's dire implications is duly made but real engagement matching it's degree of seriousness remains impossible.

And to make matters worse a newly invigorated 21^st Century fascism has emerged and is normalizing itself as a legitimate political faction hiding behind the frayed banner of nationalism. The traditional mainstream centrists parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. And the traditional left is yet to reformulate itself into something beyond simply a means of defending the remnants of social programs that resulted from capitalism's 1930s Keynesian rescue and the heady pro-labor post WWII years.

The Brit's Tories have been forced to embrace and enact the self destructive nationalistic insanity of Brexit supported by a deluded and angry working class, while its own Labor Party struggles to breath some life back into the tired discredited chimera of socialism. Here in the US the once center-right Republican Party, having sold is soul to lingering racist legacy of the old Confederacy, cynically embrace a dangerous mountebank. The once merely 'conservative' Grand Old Party that has moved so far to the right on the political spectrum that even Ronald Reagan is rolling in his grave. While the Democrats, still dazed and confused as to how they lost the presidency to such a fraud, are wondering how they allowed things to go so far 'south' (pun intended). Having long ignored a critical part of their base, the rural and rust belt trapped white working class, they now realize that they focused too much on identity politics and the placating liberals in the professional middle class. The tone deafness of the Democrats to the reality of late capitalism and its depredations on the US working class as it mutated into a heartless trade union hostile globalized version was not lost on one up and coming gifted demagogue.

When ordinary people become convinced by glib professional haters that their traditional way of life, economic livelihood and even physical safety is threatened by 'outsiders', they become mobs or sit by and watch as 'good Germans'. The reality that these so called 'invaders are' actually just ordinary people desperately fleeing the horrors of civil war, abject poverty and gang warfare is lost in the firestorm of hate fueled by fear and loathing of imaginary demons. We can only hope this fever will break before all is lost.

Proof 'climate change' is a hoax

Europe is so cold now that the Arctic appears to be a warm escape

 

Yes, it's abnormally cold in Europe and abnormally warm in Greenland. The polar vortex is apparently out or whack again. Also the northern and southern jet streams weirdly enough are interconnecting.

Here in Pacifica our problem is that our shoreline is melting with apartments buildings and homes literally at risk of falling into the ocean - and this is before any real sea level rise has even set in.

Yet SLT may not be the worst of it. There are many calamities unfolding as we warm the planet hotter than it has been in 125,000 years. Once called the the 'greenhouse effect', the terminology has becomes normalized. 'Climate change' sounds more benign. For last half of the 2oth century the great existential threat was annihilation by nuclear war - and it still is. But now a second hubris driven reality has emerged . We as a species are destroying our planet's life very capability to sustain the diversity of life as we know it. 

 

But like our own mortality it is easy to set aside the implications such an awesomely grave reality and get on with business as usual. After all life must go on. As with our inability to outlaw nuclear weapons, confronting global warming becomes just another example of our species' misuse of our several thousand year evolved tool-making genius. Simple tool making morphing over time into worldwide industrialization coupled with avarice-driven late monopoly capitalism and then malevolently entangled with our bestial territorial imperatives, makes for quite difficult nut to crack. Yet almost all 195 nations big and small some how agreed to try to tackle the problem. Hence the Paris accords.

But in the USA a large number of people voted for a political party that officially opposes doing anything about it and for a president who believes its all a “hoax”. Even the oil dependent Gulf States and the Putin-led Russkies signed on to the Paris accords. Yet we have bowed out. All of the 2016 GOP presidential candidates with one exception were off-board regarding climate change and facing up to it. And in the presidential debates it was hardly discussed.

Many of these fools hide behind fossil fuel company supported researchers or so-called contrarians who pride themselves on digging up inconsistencies and errors in the thousands of peer-reviewed research papers constantly being published. I for one hope they are right and the whole thing is a grandiose world-wide delusion, the biggest academic boondoggle in history. Then all the 'greenie' types can go back to worrying about their traditional concerns – air and water pollution, habitat loss, pesticides/ herbicides in our food, huge dead zones at the mouth of rivers, plastic islands the size of Texas in the world's oceans and so on.

Beyond the Sea Level Rise that coastal communities are facing here's a checklist of what the global warming hoax mongers claim is also happening:

• Disruption of the Jet Streams and Polar Vortex: Due to rapid warming of the arctic and less white ice surface to reflect the solar heat back, the darker water surface  is absorbing the heat and warming. This is affecting high altitudes temperatures which is in turn is disrupting the northern jet stream causing it to vary.  It now periodically dips enough to cross the equator to connect with the southern jet stream. This could have deleterious affects on agriculture by causing colder and warmer winters. Also the Polar Vortex is periodically dipping south. Whether the erratic jet streams are causing this is not clear.

• Ocean acidification. That is the name given to the ongoing decrease in the pH balance of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. About 30–40% of the carbon dioxide released by humans into the atmosphere dissolves into the oceans, rivers and lake. Too high an acidic balance impairs shell making in marine life. That's not good.

• Coral Reef Die-offs. Life sustaining coral reefs are bleaching out and dying all over the world due to ocean temperature rise. The Great Barrier Reef off of Australia's east coast has declined by 50% since 1985. Reef health is very important to global fisheries (which were already in decline due to over fishing).

• Sixth Great Extinction Over 1,400 Endangered Species are threatened by climate change according to the International Union for Conservation. The habitats where these species have evolved and thrived over millenniums are suddenly warmer and less hospitable or there is less water due to persistent droughts. So many plants and animals are now threatened that we are now experiencing an extinction rate comparable to the last five great extinctions going back 425 million years.

• Desertification As rain pattern shift, marginally productive areas for agriculture become actual deserts. All of the world's deserts are expanding due to an increase in prolonged droughts. The horrific Syrian War was triggered by a prolonged drought.

• Forest fires as a problem worsen The incidence and intensity of forest fires are worsening. In California the main fire season now extends into December. Globally fire rage longer and occur more frequently than in the past due to prolonged drought conditions.

• Storms frequency and intensity worsen: Extreme low pressure zones that give rise to hurricanes and tornadoes are random events. So no single storm or storm season can be tied to changed climate conditions. But no one can deny extremely warm waters in Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean are not factors in the parade of nasty hurricanes and extreme rain events in 2017.