Thoughts and prayers for the people of Asheville, North Carolina and Valencia, Spain due to severe flooding.
Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, was interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert October 10, 2024, in Yale Environment 360, “What’s Causing the Recent Spike in Global Temperatures?”: “We started to see something eyebrow-raising in the spring in 2023 [ . . . . ] At the end of 2023, we summed it up: It was a record warm year and it was a record-breaking size of the record. Our eyebrows at this point were rolling over the top of our heads. It was clear that the predictions that people had made at the beginning of year were all wrong. [ . . . . ] But the big uncertainty that determines whether 2100 is a happy place or a less happy place is our decisions on what we do with emissions. And they dwarf the uncertainties that we’re talking about here. We’re talking 0.1, 0.2 degrees. Well, the difference emissions make is 1 degree, 2 degrees, 3 degrees. So it’s an order of magnitude larger. And given the non-linearity of impacts, that’s a much, much larger amount of impact that we would see.”
Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, said in a June 18, 2024 YouTube published October 14, 2024, “Climate Talk – The Bottom Line”: “The latest predicts societal collapse starting as soon as 2024 for business as usual [ . . . . and ] we can’t sidestep dangerous or pervasive climate breakdown. It is going to happen now [ . . . . ]”
McGuire added temperatures have “never” “risen as quickly as they are doing now” in Earth’s 4.54 billion year history [ . . . . so ] “We have no idea what the end is going to be, absolutely none [ . . . . ]”
Curious about how Earth’s fossil fuel industries will respond if the AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) stops, I asked ChatGPT-4. It answered, “The fossil fuel industry is unlikely to shut down immediately after crossing the AMOC tipping point due to several factors, despite the potentially catastrophic consequences for the climate. [ . . . . ]”
My research noted it is unknown if the AMOC tipping point has been crossed, and there is an obvious difference between crossing the AMOC tipping point, and the AMOC stopping as it has in the past.
I asked https://www.perplexity.ai/ “How long will it take the fossil fuel industry to shut down if the AMOC stops?” Citing two sources, it answered, “The timeline for the potential shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and its implications for the fossil fuel industry is complex and uncertain. Recent studies suggest that [AMOC] collapse could occur as early as 2025 and no later than 2095, with various models indicating a range of possibilities between these dates.” Citing two sources, it added, “The urgency for decarbonization efforts would likely increase as governments respond to climate-related crises, potentially leading to regulatory changes that could hasten the decline of fossil fuel reliance.”
It has been widely noted AMOC shut down, in addition to making northern Europe much colder, will be disastrous for global agriculture with some writers or speakers noting billions of humans may starve or be forced to migrate.
Icelandic Met Office reported October 19, 2024, in “Continued greenhouse gas emissions could trigger a regional cooling around the North Atlantic,” “In an open letter released today at the Arctic Circle conference in Reykjavík, Iceland, 44 leading experts on ocean circulation and tipping points from 15 countries appeal to the Nordic Council of Ministers to take this [AMOC tipping point] risk seriously, initiate a risk assessment and take steps to minimize this risk as much as possible. [par break] The only way to limit the risk of passing those tipping points, is through greater urgency and priority in the global effort to reduce emissions. In the letter, the scientists call for an urgent and increased effort to limit global warming and reduce emissions as quickly as possible in order to stay close to the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement.”
A video offering a healthy response to our climate emergency is the Oct 24, 2023 YouTube “Living in the Metacrisis with Jonathan Rowson.” Rowson was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) whose former fellows included Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Hawking, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, David Attenborough, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Edison. With that company, one may expect Rowson’s ideas to be first-rate, and they are. He believes there is another climate story that involves finding one’s calling, and helping to bring awareness, healing, community, rethinking, reframing, redefining the meaning of human life in the beautiful and equally terrifying cosmos.
I am grateful Talking River Review at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, accepted my poem “River Ritual” about a logger kid I met steelhead fishing.
I am also grateful Traverse: Literature, Arts & the Environment at Western Oregon University accepted my poem “Beached Whale.” I had another poem about whales in my book Industrial Oz called “Essex, 1820.” That poem, which originally appeared in Poetry 24, is based on the true story of when a sperm whale rammed and sank the whaling boat Essex, partly inspiring the 1851 literary classic Moby Dick by Herman Melville:
Essex, 1820
“An ice sheet in West Antarctica is hemorrhaging a volume of ice equivalent to Mount Everest every two years, a rate much faster than scientists previously thought [ . . . ]” Zoë Schlanger in Newsweek 12/5/14
What were they thinking,
men who drew lots
and chose cannibalism,
after a giant sperm whale
defending his mate,
rammed their now sunken ship?
Did they sing to lift spirits,
and did this remind them
of grief-stricken whales
whose mates they killed,
echoing thousands of undersea miles
under champagned celebrations?
The men’s predator spirits
with too many victories
to recall or count
suddenly turned prey
in a tiny lifeboat inside
the horror instead of outside it.
Like proud men of the USA
facing climate destruction
they and their fathers,
without any foresight,
brought on themselves
and their children.
And like that day on the lifeboat,
Hopi elder Dan Evehema said
“The degree of violence will be determined
by the degree of inequity
caused among the peoples of the world
and in the balance of nature.”*
“In this crisis rich and poor
will be forced to struggle as equals
in order to survive.” *
* Anonymous Hopi