That's what I thought you meant. But we don't know if that's actually what
Hedges meant.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2018 2:43 PM
To: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth
If you switch the position of the 8 and the 9 you change 1896 into 1986.
That is a difference of ninety years, not nine years.
On 8/21/2018 1:23 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
1889 or 1898, seems to me that 9 years one way or the other isn't
going to matter. If we go with the 1898 date, all of my grandparents
had been born.
In fact, as I recall listening to them, none of my grandparents
thought about how wasteful the Industrial Revolution had made us. To
their way of thinking there was no end to Earth's bountiful resources.
During more than half of my life I subconsciously believed the same
way. It was not until the mid 80's that I began hearing about the
Greenhouse Effect.
My first conference on Climate Warming was in 1985. I recall the
speaker telling us, "If you like the climate in San Diego, you're
going to love Seattle in 2025". We all chuckled. The early focus was
on the warming trend. As scary as that was, no one was talking much
about the increased weather turbulence. The past week has been very
hard on folks with respiratory issues here in Washington State.
Several forest fires are burning over the border in Canada, and the
smoke is like a heavy fog. On a good day they call it a Haze. But on
several days they declared that our air quality was worse than that of
any of the leading polluted cities around the world.
Even as I write at 10:25 PM., I can smell smoke inside my house.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/20/18, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
That had to be a misprint. I think the 8 and the 9 got transposed.
On 8/20/2018 10:25 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Yes. I noticed the date. This is the problem with addicts. They
are the last to realize that they are addicted.
The destruction of Planet Earth's Eco System is directly connected
to the Greed of the Earth's Ruling Class. Greed is as addictive as
any drug...even a hundredfold.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Did you notice that he said that human caused climate change was
first noted in 1896?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2018 12:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: footballmania <footballmania@xxxxxxxxx>; delores selset
<dselset@xxxxxxx>; Matthew <mcblack@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth
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."
