The Generational Death March
The dog days of summer are around the corner. Major League Baseball is already upon us. Children are running through sprinklers. Fireflies accompany the warm summer nights. Many families are planning their summer vacations. The rest of us are daydreaming about planning our summer vacations. Life goes on.
There's a certain reliable and comforting mundane feel to the way seasons predictably play out over and over again. This year doesn't seem much different than the previous. It's easy to forget that we're losing the war on climate change because, for the most part, the gradual warming is hard to perceive. It's hard to physically experience the fact that there were more warm days this year than the year prior. Warm is warm. Some days you sweat. Some years you experience a late snow storm the spring. Your body catalogs the experiences but does a poor job analyzing them in any meaningful way. It records the numbers but doesn't do the math for you. But I can.
There are 12.3 million manufacturing workers in the US. Nearly a million workers employed by the fracking industry. There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers. Each of these workers have jobs because you are demanding something from them. A new car, that new kitchen table you've been eyeing, a bigger house, or something as small as seasonal fruit in the middle of January. Our consumerism drives demand and we are hopelessly endlessly consumers. Consumerism has become an important facet of our identities. We define ourselves by the brands we buy, services we use, and things we own. We like to imagine ourselves as better people by the cleaning supplies we use, the makeup we wear, the clothes we display, and things we have.
All of these workers have something else in common, too. They're working towards our collective extinction. And like their parents before them, they will raise productive members of society who will also work towards our collective extinction. We are on a multi-generational death march as we build the death traps into which we will send our descendants.
In a sick, twisted capitalistic game, we are compelled to work in order to survive. We define hard labor as virtuous. We praise good work ethics. Our political leaders campaign on the "value of hard work." We are only good, ethical, and virtuous so long as we produce something that generates profit for someone else. That work contributes to climate change. We are working ourselves and consuming ourselves into our own extinction and because we are bound by the chains of capitalism we do not have the freedom to simply walk away.
We are trapped on a mouse's exercise wheel that powers the Easy-Bake Oven we created to serve as our world. As the talented Emmett Rensin wrote, "By the middle of the century, we may all boil to death in our own bodies. It would only take seven or eight degrees of global warming." But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the time between those seven or eight degrees will be safe. We may not live long enough to boil to death when there are other dangers of climate change lunging at our heels while we run the rat race.
In 2013, a deadly tornado outbreak cut a path down the United States. 18 people were killed by the twisting monster that spanned 2.6 miles wide - a record. “[T]he width of the tornado was equivalent to the entire north-south length of New York City’s Central Park." Ten years earlier, another unprecedented monster ripped the country in half at 2.5 miles wide. By comparison, the average size of a tornado is less than half a mile wide.
In 2015, records were broken when a forest fire consumed and destroyed more than 10 million acres. The US military waged war against the inferno. The fires destroyed land that is roughly the size of both Massachusetts and Connecticut if they were combined together. And although 2015 stands out as a record breaking year, 9 out of the 10 worst years for wildfires have occurred since 2000.
The headlines are already terrifying: superstorms that flood NYC subway tunnels, we're in the midst of a mass extinction event, stronger hurricanes are occurring more frequently, and we have record breaking tornadoes. Forest fires burn longer, hotter, and larger now. 2016 was the warmest year on record. Before that 2015 was the warmest year on record. Before that, 2014 was the warmest year on record.
Five small low lying islands have already succumbed to climate change. Entire villages have already been destroyed displacing its populations.
Climate change is already here. The effects will only become more disastrous the warmer it gets. We are on the precipice. If the climate were a roller coaster, we're breaching that first hill. But at the end of this roller coaster, you don't get to catch your bearings, pick up the belongings you left in the cubby, and scoot off to the next thrill. You merely reach The End. Your death. The death of those you love. The death of all of the belongings you worked tirelessly to accumulate.
In an attempt to offset the effects of climate change, the Paris Agreement was struck with the aim of keeping warming at below 1.5 degrees Celsius but also definitely not more than our run off target of 2 degrees Celsius. 1.5 degrees of warming was the threshold for, "the upper limit of present-day natural variability." In other words, it was the maximum temperature that we could reach in order to keep the earth as it currently is (more or less). Yes, the weather patterns will intensify, wildfires will overrun, and coral reefs would continue to bleach at alarming rates and millions of people will still die but life would go on for the majority of people. At 2 degrees of warming, earth's transformations emerge.
How close are we to our 1.5 target? Many months in 2016 averaged a temperate of 1.48 degrees Celsius with monthly highs above 1.6 degrees Celsius. The window to keep warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius or below closed under Obama. By the end of President Trump's second term, we will likely have surpassed our 1.5 degree target.
At 1.5 degrees Celsius:
Weather that strikes once every thousand days will increase tenfold. Weather intensity would increase by a third: heat waves lasting a third longer, rain storms more intense by a third, and so forth. Coral reefs have a slim but tangible chance of reversing coral bleaching and mass die offs.
Dust bowl conditions will creep into Nebraska, in eastern Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, northern Texas, and Oklahoma where these regions will be starved of water throwing its populations into a generational drought.
But global climate change is not localized climate change. The Middle East and North Africa will warm at twice the rate forcing hundreds of millions of refugees to flee for their very survival in order to avoid being cooked to death. By the middle of the century, sometime around 2050, the average localized temperature could average 2.5 degrees warmer with summer highs of around 5 degrees warmer. By the end of the century, this region could experience approximately 200 hot days per year making the region uninhabitable.
By 2100, 83 years from now, the sea level will have risen by at least 8 feet (2.5 meters). New Orleans will be under water. In New York City, "Battery Park City, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn’s [will be] ... submerged. The Dumbo carousel [will stand] solitary in the East River, and the barrier spits of the Rockaways and Coney Island mostly [vanish]."
Despite the ever expanding waterline, the availability of freshwater will decline by about 10% creating water scarcity as fresh water sources dissipates, glaciers melt, and snowfall is reduced. The hardest impacted areas will be throughout the Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
Remember, this warming is unavoidable. This is the future emerging before us starting slowly with unusual weather events and ending with mass exodus. All of this is building while we lazily spend our summer days on Twitter, watching movies, and drinking with friends. All of this will continue to build until we brace a radical climate change policy that centrism and neoliberalism cannot offer.
We are on track to reach 2 degrees Celsius by 2030. Along with 2 degrees Celsius comes with this stark warning: 2 degrees Celsius is the magic number world leaders have agreed is the absolute most the earth can tolerate before cataclysmic climate change occurs. In other words, the horrors detailed at 1.5 degrees of warming aren't defined as cataclysmic.
At 2 degrees Celsius:
Weather that strikes once every thousand days will increase twentyfold. Yemen, areas in southwest Asia, and regions of the Persian Gulf will be inhabitable displacing more than millions more (Yemen, alone, has a population of 28 million people).
At 2 degrees, we start talking about things like the thermal limit for crops, insects, and animals (including ourselves). Crops, such a food, could be halved in Africa. That slim chance for reversing the effects for coral bleaching completely disappears.
Sea levels will eventually rise by 20 feet (6 meters). In New York City, the 9/11 memorial will be surrounded by water. Atlantic City disappears. Virginia Beach will just be ocean. Significant swaths of Savannah will have washed into the ocean. Yet 20% of the world's freshwater will be depleted.
There's a serious and legitimate concern that 2 degrees might be the tipping point for runaway climate change. This is the point at which climate change may be unstoppable. But even if it were stoppable, one climate change model projects 4 degrees of warming by 2100.
Source for the below chart:
Unsurprisingly, psychologists have identified the emergence of pre-traumatic stress disorder among climate scientists. Climate scientists have seen the future and it's freaking them the hell out. Jonathan Franzen described the stark reality of climate change like this: "[earth] resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy."
So what do you do when the world is ending? When you are not only the witness but also the architect and builder of your own demise?
My husband and I have decided against having biological children. When the time is ready, we will adopt. However, we could not justify bringing a child into this world. Ethically, we know the future we have built and do not want to subject our children to it. Ecologically, reproduction is expensive. It contributes to the warming that will inevitably kill us (or them) one day. We cannot justify the ecological footprint.
Between disfiguring aggression or palliative treatment, I choose compassion. To make the earth and the inhabitants powering the oven that will lead to our deaths more comfortable during these transitory periods. To support open borders and unrestricted refugees. To build walls to keep climate change out but to allow all others in.
And I choose education. I choose to call out soft climate change skepticism among Democrats just as fiercely as I call out hard climate change denial-ism among Republicans. I choose to talk openly about the perils that lay ahead and our obligations to all animal lives impacted by our behavior.
Beyond that, I have no advice or wisdom to offer.
While we were arguing on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook about Hillary Clinton vs Trump... the road forked. We took the fork that could cause our own extinction. But most of us don't realize that yet. We will go on about our days sharing YouTube videos, planning supper, and thinking about the weekend.
There's a certain reliable and comforting mundane feel to the way seasons predictably play out over and over again. This year doesn't seem much different than the previous. It's easy to forget that we're losing the war on climate change because, for the most part, the gradual warming is hard to perceive. It's hard to physically experience the fact that there were more warm days this year than the year prior. Warm is warm. Some days you sweat. Some years you experience a late snow storm the spring. Your body catalogs the experiences but does a poor job analyzing them in any meaningful way. It records the numbers but doesn't do the math for you. But I can.
There are 12.3 million manufacturing workers in the US. Nearly a million workers employed by the fracking industry. There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers. Each of these workers have jobs because you are demanding something from them. A new car, that new kitchen table you've been eyeing, a bigger house, or something as small as seasonal fruit in the middle of January. Our consumerism drives demand and we are hopelessly endlessly consumers. Consumerism has become an important facet of our identities. We define ourselves by the brands we buy, services we use, and things we own. We like to imagine ourselves as better people by the cleaning supplies we use, the makeup we wear, the clothes we display, and things we have.
All of these workers have something else in common, too. They're working towards our collective extinction. And like their parents before them, they will raise productive members of society who will also work towards our collective extinction. We are on a multi-generational death march as we build the death traps into which we will send our descendants.
In a sick, twisted capitalistic game, we are compelled to work in order to survive. We define hard labor as virtuous. We praise good work ethics. Our political leaders campaign on the "value of hard work." We are only good, ethical, and virtuous so long as we produce something that generates profit for someone else. That work contributes to climate change. We are working ourselves and consuming ourselves into our own extinction and because we are bound by the chains of capitalism we do not have the freedom to simply walk away.
We are trapped on a mouse's exercise wheel that powers the Easy-Bake Oven we created to serve as our world. As the talented Emmett Rensin wrote, "By the middle of the century, we may all boil to death in our own bodies. It would only take seven or eight degrees of global warming." But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the time between those seven or eight degrees will be safe. We may not live long enough to boil to death when there are other dangers of climate change lunging at our heels while we run the rat race.
In 2013, a deadly tornado outbreak cut a path down the United States. 18 people were killed by the twisting monster that spanned 2.6 miles wide - a record. “[T]he width of the tornado was equivalent to the entire north-south length of New York City’s Central Park." Ten years earlier, another unprecedented monster ripped the country in half at 2.5 miles wide. By comparison, the average size of a tornado is less than half a mile wide.
In 2015, records were broken when a forest fire consumed and destroyed more than 10 million acres. The US military waged war against the inferno. The fires destroyed land that is roughly the size of both Massachusetts and Connecticut if they were combined together. And although 2015 stands out as a record breaking year, 9 out of the 10 worst years for wildfires have occurred since 2000.
The headlines are already terrifying: superstorms that flood NYC subway tunnels, we're in the midst of a mass extinction event, stronger hurricanes are occurring more frequently, and we have record breaking tornadoes. Forest fires burn longer, hotter, and larger now. 2016 was the warmest year on record. Before that 2015 was the warmest year on record. Before that, 2014 was the warmest year on record.
Five small low lying islands have already succumbed to climate change. Entire villages have already been destroyed displacing its populations.
Climate change is already here. The effects will only become more disastrous the warmer it gets. We are on the precipice. If the climate were a roller coaster, we're breaching that first hill. But at the end of this roller coaster, you don't get to catch your bearings, pick up the belongings you left in the cubby, and scoot off to the next thrill. You merely reach The End. Your death. The death of those you love. The death of all of the belongings you worked tirelessly to accumulate.
In an attempt to offset the effects of climate change, the Paris Agreement was struck with the aim of keeping warming at below 1.5 degrees Celsius but also definitely not more than our run off target of 2 degrees Celsius. 1.5 degrees of warming was the threshold for, "the upper limit of present-day natural variability." In other words, it was the maximum temperature that we could reach in order to keep the earth as it currently is (more or less). Yes, the weather patterns will intensify, wildfires will overrun, and coral reefs would continue to bleach at alarming rates and millions of people will still die but life would go on for the majority of people. At 2 degrees of warming, earth's transformations emerge.
How close are we to our 1.5 target? Many months in 2016 averaged a temperate of 1.48 degrees Celsius with monthly highs above 1.6 degrees Celsius. The window to keep warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius or below closed under Obama. By the end of President Trump's second term, we will likely have surpassed our 1.5 degree target.
At 1.5 degrees Celsius:
Weather that strikes once every thousand days will increase tenfold. Weather intensity would increase by a third: heat waves lasting a third longer, rain storms more intense by a third, and so forth. Coral reefs have a slim but tangible chance of reversing coral bleaching and mass die offs.
Dust bowl conditions will creep into Nebraska, in eastern Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, northern Texas, and Oklahoma where these regions will be starved of water throwing its populations into a generational drought.
But global climate change is not localized climate change. The Middle East and North Africa will warm at twice the rate forcing hundreds of millions of refugees to flee for their very survival in order to avoid being cooked to death. By the middle of the century, sometime around 2050, the average localized temperature could average 2.5 degrees warmer with summer highs of around 5 degrees warmer. By the end of the century, this region could experience approximately 200 hot days per year making the region uninhabitable.
By 2100, 83 years from now, the sea level will have risen by at least 8 feet (2.5 meters). New Orleans will be under water. In New York City, "Battery Park City, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn’s [will be] ... submerged. The Dumbo carousel [will stand] solitary in the East River, and the barrier spits of the Rockaways and Coney Island mostly [vanish]."
Despite the ever expanding waterline, the availability of freshwater will decline by about 10% creating water scarcity as fresh water sources dissipates, glaciers melt, and snowfall is reduced. The hardest impacted areas will be throughout the Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
Remember, this warming is unavoidable. This is the future emerging before us starting slowly with unusual weather events and ending with mass exodus. All of this is building while we lazily spend our summer days on Twitter, watching movies, and drinking with friends. All of this will continue to build until we brace a radical climate change policy that centrism and neoliberalism cannot offer.
We are on track to reach 2 degrees Celsius by 2030. Along with 2 degrees Celsius comes with this stark warning: 2 degrees Celsius is the magic number world leaders have agreed is the absolute most the earth can tolerate before cataclysmic climate change occurs. In other words, the horrors detailed at 1.5 degrees of warming aren't defined as cataclysmic.
At 2 degrees Celsius:
Weather that strikes once every thousand days will increase twentyfold. Yemen, areas in southwest Asia, and regions of the Persian Gulf will be inhabitable displacing more than millions more (Yemen, alone, has a population of 28 million people).
At 2 degrees, we start talking about things like the thermal limit for crops, insects, and animals (including ourselves). Crops, such a food, could be halved in Africa. That slim chance for reversing the effects for coral bleaching completely disappears.
Sea levels will eventually rise by 20 feet (6 meters). In New York City, the 9/11 memorial will be surrounded by water. Atlantic City disappears. Virginia Beach will just be ocean. Significant swaths of Savannah will have washed into the ocean. Yet 20% of the world's freshwater will be depleted.
There's a serious and legitimate concern that 2 degrees might be the tipping point for runaway climate change. This is the point at which climate change may be unstoppable. But even if it were stoppable, one climate change model projects 4 degrees of warming by 2100.
Source for the below chart:
Unsurprisingly, psychologists have identified the emergence of pre-traumatic stress disorder among climate scientists. Climate scientists have seen the future and it's freaking them the hell out. Jonathan Franzen described the stark reality of climate change like this: "[earth] resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy."
So what do you do when the world is ending? When you are not only the witness but also the architect and builder of your own demise?
My husband and I have decided against having biological children. When the time is ready, we will adopt. However, we could not justify bringing a child into this world. Ethically, we know the future we have built and do not want to subject our children to it. Ecologically, reproduction is expensive. It contributes to the warming that will inevitably kill us (or them) one day. We cannot justify the ecological footprint.
Between disfiguring aggression or palliative treatment, I choose compassion. To make the earth and the inhabitants powering the oven that will lead to our deaths more comfortable during these transitory periods. To support open borders and unrestricted refugees. To build walls to keep climate change out but to allow all others in.
And I choose education. I choose to call out soft climate change skepticism among Democrats just as fiercely as I call out hard climate change denial-ism among Republicans. I choose to talk openly about the perils that lay ahead and our obligations to all animal lives impacted by our behavior.
Beyond that, I have no advice or wisdom to offer.
While we were arguing on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook about Hillary Clinton vs Trump... the road forked. We took the fork that could cause our own extinction. But most of us don't realize that yet. We will go on about our days sharing YouTube videos, planning supper, and thinking about the weekend.
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