gray daze: 2023

Thursday, December 21, 2023

TIPPING POINTS AND COP28

from Understanding climate tipping points: PHYS.ORG

As COP28 winds down humankind now faces at least four major irreversible climate change
tipping points. One can't help but feel COP28 was just a deceitful ruse in which the world leaders of richer countries pretend to address a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions with hot air and empty promises. This, while the leaders of lesser countries, more vulnerable (and less responsible for the,crisis) ineffectively resisted. Run an Internet search on “tipping points in the climate crisis” and dozens of alarming scientific studies and sobering assessments will pop up along with innumerable full color graphic depictions of the crisis.

The main online news sources (NY Times, etc) do dutifully include the latest grim assess-ments and warnings from IPCC and other scientific organizations. But the seriousness of the problem is drown out by background noise like the latest accounts of mass shootings (US), natural disasters (often climate change induced), endless on-going wars, and other madness. And of course there is the daily dose of interminable political wrangling and now dark threats to our very democracy.. And that's for those who still read online or follow MSM rather than relying on second-hand crapola passed along through social media. Yet on the Climate Crisis front all the indicators are flashing bright red with bells ringing loudly. But, alas, most of us have either turned off the source of the noise or havebecome inured to it.

Yet the tipping points and their feedback loops are upon us. Once we are over the brink, it will be too f***ing late.

1. Collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica

2. Widespread thawing of permafrost

3. Death of coral reefs worldwide.

4. Collapse of a major oceanic current in the North Atlantic

These calamitous possibilities (or are they already inevitabilities?) stand as a dark backdrop as the world's so-called leaders and/or their acolytes again assemble for yet another charade - COP28. It's number 28 and still no firm acknowledgment that the burning of fossil fuels must stop as soon as possible. Ostensibly they gather annually to agree upon as to how all of the world's 195+ nations can collectively confront the greatest threat ever faced by human-kind. Yet this year's COP28 was hosted (un-ironically) by an oil producing Gulf State – the United Arab Emirates. Is there even a smidgen of surprise that again there will be no resoundingly firm commitment to ending our deadly embrace of fossil fuels.

The citizens of the several very wealthy Gulf States like UAE, none of which are democracies, have the world's largest per capita energy footprints. They work and live surrounded by a luxurious negation of anything environmentally sound, in monstrous 21st Century space age skyscrapers (including the highest building in the world, the 2,722 ft. Burj Khalifa, in Dubai). This monstrosity makes the Empire State Building look like some lowly Omaha Nebraska bank building. All of these glitzy ultra high-rise structures existing in a roasting hot desert climate are kept so cold that some people even wear sweaters inside.

The current fantasy peddled by the petrostates (and the fossil fuel industries) and included in the COP28 discussions is the unproven techno-fix, 'C02 sequestration', injecting CO2 back back into the ground. This comfortable delusion is that someday this technology will actually prove feasible and allow the lucrative oil business to proceed as usual. This fantasy is fostered while each year the average global temperature exceeds the previous one temper-ature exceeds the previous one. Even if this stab at geoengineering worked it would only slow or even cripple the still necessary difficult transition.

This year's COP28 made headlines by finally agreeing to grudgingly include the statement in their final agreement that all 195+ nation states) would begin "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner." It took 28 meetings to get to to this obvious acknowledgment - no real committment, no real plan. One continues to wonder how seriously our political leaders and their billionaire friends are taking the impending doom that they are still not materially confronting. Or are they blowing (more) hot air our way while simply squirreling away as much money as possible to build artificial redoubts that can survive a new Paleocene Epoch?

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

COLDEST JUNE DAY IN MEMORY

Out my front window cold gray haze to the horizon.

It's the coldest June in Pacifica since I moved here in 1993. Somehow we are in a strange chilly stretch that rivals full-on winter. A marine layer consisting of gray overcast and light on-shore winds are normal for summer here - but not so damn cold. This morning my thermometer registered 59F inside and 51F outside (with 51F w/ high humidity makes it seem much colder).

And what a day for bad news on the Climate Crisis front. As we push into summer all sorts of things are happening that are not good.

The forests of Canada continue to burn like never before – see map. Air quality in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh is classified as Very Unhealthy.

A heat wave almost to the “wet bulb” stage (over100F w/ high humidity) encompasses the American Southeast (MAGA-land packed w/ climate deniers).

Dead sea lions and porpoises are washing up on California beaches.

Freak weather soaks Australian outback, dumping months of rain in two days.

As we descend deeper into this critical decade in which either we start to meaningfully address this crisis or pass the point of no return, it doesn't look good. Yes, things are being done and some on a large scale. And technological breakthroughs that would help are being made and if implemented at the scale required could make a difference. But the climate globally keeps getting fucking hotter (even if Pacifica is having an especially cold summer). Keep in mind that if we reversed the warming today it would require decades to make any difference.

It seems with all this outpouring of grim news on the state of the global ecological situation there would be more of an uprising from the peasants, more pitchforks and burning effegys.

But the population for the most part is constantly being distracted by more immediate material concerns either serious of facile. This while the powers that be, our leaders, continue to engage in their age-old habits of geopolitical gamesmanship and imperialistic rivalry including (yes again) another arms race. And it doesn't help when one superpower's entire economy dependent on arms production.

Interconnected wirth international power games there is the immediate need to maintain the always precarious global economy at the nation state level.

And with much of the world's population's lower classes still mired in a near survival mode, while the middle classes in both older and newly industrialized countries remain involved in competitive conspicuous consumption goaded on by Fortune 500 corporate advertising. The basic problems is capitalist economies must either grow, or they stop and everyone suffers. But if they grow they must continue to consume a finite amount of now precious natural resources – and in the process produce prodigious amounts of toxic waste. If these tenuous market driven economies stop growing, they stall and/or contract. If that happens a dreaded recession occurs laying off lower and middle class workers right and left, stranding many without any means to maintain their former situational status.

So even leaders, aware of the damaging effects of continued growth on a now overheating biosphere, must first survive politically by feeding the beast so as to keeping their respective economies perking right along, that is growing. This regardless of the increasing well document evidence of the deleterious and eventually cataclysmic effects of a rapidly heating planet. And to make matters worse a parasitic billionaire class has a disproportionate influence over said leaders either of the autocratic variety (also themselves billionaires) or the (merely wealthy) democratic variety. So world leaders locally, nationally, globally continue to dilly and dally as the weather gets ever weirder. Their first concern must always be their own political survival.

And in the US you have an entire political persuasion (the GOP) with their own opportunistic and demagogic political leaders who have convinced itself that all of these “environmental issues” especially the so-called Climate Crisis is nothing but a 'hobby horse of the Left'. Only when panic sets in like skyrocketing food prices will a crisis mentality sets in and will these leaders on the US Right react and whole wholeheartedly suddenly embrace hare brained and dangerous geoengineering quick fixes.

We are indeed in a bind. We are prisoners to our tribal inclinations writ large as nation states. No powerful nation state will allow any international entity to take anything close to full command no matter how enlightened that a global entitie's leadership might be. The nation state remains a primitive embodiment of an ancient tribal past with its superannuated quest for imperialistic dominance now re-framed as 'hegemony'. Leaders may pretend to have higher more holistic aspirations than raw dominance but their need to justify themselves and their nation state and its population (with its nationalism) always finally prevails. Hence the weakness of United Nations as a global institution in confronting this world historical crisis of ongoing inexorable damage to the biosphere that we as a species evolved in.

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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

90 Seconds Before Midnight

It is sad how an ongoing humanitarian disaster like the Ukraine War has dragged on long enough to become stale old news even as it continues to pose the possibility of a thermonuclear war. In late January of this year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" to 90 seconds before midnight -- the closest humanity has ever been to Armageddon.

Americans for the most part seem oblivious as they obsess over pocketbook issues and Republican Party driven culture wars - or at least the media makes it seem that way. Judging from comments on any column that suggests peace talks regarding Ukraine, most readers of the NY Times seem convinced that this war must be pursued until the Russians are driven out of all of the Ukraine; furthermore Russian must be bled bone dry and made into a pathetic pariah state like North Korea and hopefully Vladimir Putin driven from power. And if any peace accord allows Putin to retain any part of the Ukraine including the Crimea, it will be perceived by Putin as victory - and he will soon be back for another bite of Europe.

Are we to believe that Vladimir Putin's ill-equipped demoralized army is a threat equivalent to Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht? Putin wishes that were the case. The 1930's are not the 2020's. In the 1930s fascism was seen by many as the solution to a general social breakdown. Capitalism had crashed. On the left Marxist explanations and solutions were being seriously considered by the intelligentsia. On the right Mussolini's fascism seemed to be rescuing Italy. The German version of fascism, Nazism, was alluring. Even Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh liked it. Nazi Germany was an ascendant power then, post-Soviet Russian is not.

We are all blithely assuming that the Biden Administration knows what they are doing. But it is alarming that so little attention is given to the thin ice that we are skating on. The ex-USSR's thermonuclear armed ICBM arsenal is still intact and their fleet of thermonuclear armed submarines are still out there. Does it make sense to humiliate Putin so badly that he is driven into actually deploying a tactical nuke? What would that mean? It would necessitate an equally serious response from US/NATO (read: Biden). There is general agreement that the invasion of Ukraine was an off-the-charts act of aggression – and that it went badly. How it looks to the over a hundred non aligned countries large and small is another matter. To them the US and wars are synonymous – Korea, Vietnam, Central America, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. It never ends. Of course many of them are no strangers to brutal internecine conflict, border squabbles, terrorism and civil wars.

The point is that Putin must be extricated from his blunder without triggering WW III but also not establishing a precedent of nuclear armed autocrats getting away with cross-border aggression by using us all as a hostages, the ultimate act of terrorism. But it is especially the case with the ex-Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal and now presumably the Peoples Republic of China. The question remains does the protection of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) still apply?

But to make matter worse President Biden is now following Donald Trump in blaming our decline in global leadership status on China and vilifying Xi Jinping. Ironically Biden is taking a lead from his loathed predecessor DJ Trump and his foolish neo-mercantilism ("Trade wars are easy to win.") and going a step further and cranking up a brand new Cold War with China. This of course is pushing them into a more defined relationship with Putin's Russia even has they don't approve of Putin's ill-advised and tragic war. Furthermore, the Biden administration believes Xi's China is on brink of imitating Putin's disastrous mistake with respect to their much coveted Taiwan.

Our most influential opinion making apparatuses seem to be fine with all of this. Only the mindless fucks on the political right (MAGA types, Marjorie Taylor Green wackos, etc.), who are knee-jerk opposed to any position the Demos takes on anything, are at all publicly critical. One must revert to rummaging through YouTube to encounter any opinions that divert from our corporate media and Washington Consensus. One has to look up Jeffery Sachs, John Meresherme or Noam Chomsky on You Tube to get any alternative opinion - or any historical context. The core of the problem with Putin's disaster is historical. It goes back to the betrayal of Mikal Gorbachev. Gorbachev was an idealistic reformer who was intent on converting the broken, autocratic socialist experiment, the Soviet Union, into a modern European style social democracy. And importantly he was promised that NATO would not expand eastward. But successive military industrial complex influenced administrations both Republican and Democratic Party did just that with Russian by 2022 almost surrounded on one entire side with nuclear armed NATO members. Putin paranoid, autocratic, nationalistic and ex- KGB believed that Ukraine would soon join. And he had been pecking away at Ukraine for years. He apparently foresaw the Ukraine eventually allowed into the EU as well admission into NATO, a total shrinkage of the Russian Federation's sphere of influence. Some experts believe the invasion could been avoided had Putin been assured that Ukraine would stay neutral and not eventually join NATO.

The real question is at what point does the Ukrainian bloodbath end? What will stop this contest between a seemingly endless supply of morale challenged Russian conscripts fed into a meat grinder vs a highly motivated but limited supply of Ukrainians? All wars eventually end. What will it take to end this one? It's crazy that that question never comes up in our saber rattling media. The media likes provocation – if it bleeds it leads: murders, violent confrontations, economic crises and especially wars where we (or our surrogates) are fighting bad guys. The media runs selling eyeballs (and now mouse clicks) to advertisers. They are unapologetic money making enterprises, ruling class billionaire owned corporations. Education and historical background is for books and college courses not for news channels and 'newspapers' (the few online versions that are left). Context implies analysis which in turn requires some ideological underpinnings. Media likes to provide news bereft of complicating nuance pretending to be objective and free of bias. But the very selection of new items themselves is steeped in subjectivity.

Daily witnessing the Ukraine War unfold is like watching the grimmest bloodiest days of WWII unfold in real time. Now aided by the satellite supported US media we can sit at home eating popcorn cheering our side and booing the bad guys. This might seem like simply a modern version gladiatorial entertainment with tanks and guns instead of swords and shields if it were not for the dark cloud of a possible thermonuclear doomsday hovering overhead, a meta-catastrophe of such a grand scale that it would pretty much end our so-called civilization.

It would make our present slow boil of climate change catastrophe seem like the long lost days of a bygone Eden.

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