On 8/20/18, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As with most Prophets, Chris Hedges is not a cheery fellow. But his
articles, books and reports over the past years ring true. If we are
to preserve Life, including us, on Planet Earth, we need to listen and
we need to Act!
Carl Jarvis
On 8/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth
Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The spectacular rise of human civilization-its agrarian societies,
cities,
states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from
irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion-took place during the
last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was
buried,
before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the
Empire
State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion
years
old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end
with
the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and
pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to
the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make
the
biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.
The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the
Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare,
slavery,
genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago,
and
saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in
the
form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7
billion.
Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures
climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most
likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate
conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our
march
toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in
1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.
The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human
progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the
wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are
entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including
those
emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak
this
unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for
hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was
in
pre-modern societies.
Ate and Nemesis were minor deities who were evoked in ancient Greek
drama.
Those infected with hubris, the Greeks warned, lost touch with the
sacred,
believed they could defy fate, or fortuna, and abandoned humility and
virtue. They thought of themselves as gods. Their hubris blinded them to
human limits and led them to carry out acts of suicidal folly, embodied
in
the god Ate. This provoked the wrath of the gods. Divine retribution, in
the
form of Nemesis, led to tragedy and death and then restored balance and
order, once those poisoned with hubris were eradicated. "Too late, too
late
you see the path of wisdom," the Chorus in the play "Antigone" tells
Creon,
ruler of Thebes, whose family has died because of his hubris.
"We're probably not the first time there's been a civilization in the
universe," Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of
Rochester and the author of "Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the
Fate
of the Earth," told me when we met in New York.
"The idea that we're destroying the planet gives us way too much credit,"
he
went on. "Certainly, we're pushing the earth into a new era. If we look
at
the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long
run,
the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for
it.
It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not
be
a part of that experiment."
Civilizations probably have risen elsewhere in the universe, developed
complex societies and then died because of their own technological
advances.
Every star in the night sky is believed to be circled by planets, some 10
billion trillion of which astronomers such as Frank Drake estimate are
hospitable to life.
"If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going
to
be the same," Adam Frank said. "You're going to have a hard time not
triggering climate change."
Astronomers call the inevitable death of advanced civilizations across
the
universe "the great filter." Robin Hanson in the essay, "The Great
Filter-Are We Almost Past It?" argues that advanced civilizations hit a
wall
or a barrier that makes continued existence impossible. The more that
human
societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become "energy
intensive" and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many
astronomers
theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the
universe. They destroyed themselves.
"For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have
certain emotional characteristics," Frank said. "You can imagine certain
civilizations saying, 'I'm not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those
are
crazy.' But climate change, you can't get away from. If you build a
civilization, you're using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back
on
the planet, and you're going to push yourself into a kind of
Anthropocene.
It's probably universal."
Frank said that our inability to project ourselves into a future beyond
our
own life spans makes it hard for us to grasp the reality and consequences
of
severe climate change. Scenarios for dramatic climate change often center
around the year 2100, when most adults living now will be dead. Although
this projection may turn out to be overly optimistic given the
accelerating
rate of climate change, it allows societies to ignore-because it is
outside
the life span of most living adults-the slow-motion tsunami that is
occurring.
"We think we're not a part of the biosphere-that we're above it-that
we're
special," Frank said. "We're not special."
"We're the experiment that the biosphere is running now," he said. "A
hundred million years ago, it was grassland. Grasslands were a new
evolutionary innovation. They changed the planet, changed how the planet
worked. Then the planet went on and did things with it. Industrial
civilization is the latest experiment. We will keep being a part of that
experiment or, with the way that we're pushing the biosphere, it will
just
move on without us."
"We have been sending probes to every other planet in the solar system
for
the last 60 years," he said. "We have rovers running around on Mars.
We've
learned generically how planets work. From Venus, we've learned about the
runaway greenhouse effect. On Venus the temperature is 800 degrees. You
can
melt lead [there]. Mars is a totally dry, barren world now. But it used
to
have an ocean. It used to be a blue world. We have models that can
predict
the climate. I can predict the weather on Mars tomorrow via these climate
models. People who think the only way we can understand climate is by
studying the earth now, that's completely untrue. These other
worlds-Mars,
Venus, Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn that has an amazingly rich
atmosphere. They all teach us how to think like a planet. They have
taught
us generically how planets behave."
Frank points out that much of the configurations of the ecosystem on
which
we depend have not always been part of the planet's biosphere. This
includes
the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water and warm air up from Florida to
Boston and out across the Atlantic.
"Hundreds of millions of people in some of Earth's most technologically
advanced cities rely on the mild climate delivered by the Gulf Stream,"
Frank writes in "Light of the Stars." "But the Gulf Stream is nothing
more
than a particular circulation pattern formed during a particular climate
state the Earth settled into after the last ice age ended. It is not a
permanent fixture of the planet."
"Everything we think about the earth just happens to be this one moment
we
found it in," he told me. "We're pushing it [the planet] and we're
pushing
it hard. We don't have much time to make these transitions. What people
have
to understand is that climate change is our cosmic adolescence. We should
have expected this. The question is not 'did we change the climate?' It's
'of course we changed the climate. What else did you expect to have
happened?' We're like a teenager who has been given this power over
ourselves. Just like how you give a teenager the keys to the car, there's
this moment where you're like, 'Oh my God I hope you make it.' And that's
what we are."
"Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that
you don't make adolescence go away," Frank said. "It is a dangerous
transition that you have to navigate. . The question is are we smart
enough
to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a
pollution
problem. It's not like any environmental problem we've faced before. In
some
sense, it's not an environmental problem but a planetary transition.
We've
already pushed the earth into it. We're going to have to evolve a new way
of
being a civilization, fundamentally."
"We will either evolve those group behaviors quickly or the earth will
take
what we've given it, in terms of new climate states, and move on and
create
new species," he said.
Frank said the mathematical models for the future of the planet have
three
trajectories. One is a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human
population and then an uneasy stabilization. The second is complete
collapse
and extinction. The third is a dramatic reconfiguration of human society
to
protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive not for
human
beings but for the health of the planet. This would include halting our
consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet and
dismantling the animal agriculture industry as well as greening deserts
and
restoring rainforests.
There is, Frank warned, a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so
degraded no human activity will halt runaway climate change. He cites
Venus
again.
"The water on Venus got lost slowly," he said. "The CO2 built up. There
was
no way to take it out of the atmosphere. It gets hotter. The fact that it
gets hotter makes it even hotter. Which makes it even hotter. That's what
would happen in the collapse model. Planets have minds of their own. They
are super-complex systems. Once you get the ball rolling down the hill. .
This is the greatest fear. This is why we don't want to go past 2 degrees
[Celsius] of climate change. We're scared that once you get past 2
degrees,
the planet's own internal mechanisms kick in. The population comes down
like
a stone. A complete collapse. You lose the civilization entirely."
