May 11, 2023, NASA scientist Peter Kalmus wrote, “I was just at a NASA team meeting for 3 days in DC. The scientific findings are so fucked up. Experts on tropical rainforests told me privately that they think the Amazon has already passed its tipping point. Let that sink in. The world needs to know.” I thought, In addition to loss of all those animal, bird, fish, plant, and insect species, all those gorgeous living colors, unknown-by-us medicines and foods, what are the estimated 400 Amazon rainforest tribes supposed to do?
This reminds me of when the very conservative IPCC reported October 8, 2018, in section B.4.2. of its SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5 ºC — Summary for Policymakers, “Coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline [ . . . ] (>99%) at 2°C (very high confidence).” I wrote in my November 24, 2019 post, “I have seen pushback claiming humanity is not in a climate crisis, but tell that to the estimated 500 million to 1 billion people depending on those coral reefs for food and/or jobs that will clearly be lost unless some miracle science, not yet invented, saves them.”
In my April 12, 2023 post I quoted former Harvard Fellow Ye Tao, “two degrees is already passed [no matter what we do]” and “At three degrees C [above year 1850 baseline] we’re talking about planetary scale biological annihilation of any multicellular species [ . . . ]”
Raised in Oregon, I have a strong emotional connection to nature as in the Amazon rainforest and coral reefs. I could sit in a corner and cry for a thousand years, but I don’t think that would help. In one of my most-visted posts, “PLAYA Climate Change Discussion July 7, 2016,” I imagined the Ghost of Bukowski saying near an Eastern Oregon stream, “we must find/some way//to make joy/no matter what.”
One writer said to me something like, “Okay, so maybe we will lose many things, but we will adapt. Life goes on. Get over it.” It seems cruel to say those things to Amazon tribes, island nations, Oregonians, and all those living close to nature. I recall poet Ted Hughes described the silvery side of a steelhead trout he had just caught as “metabolism of stars.” Contrast this with blind pale fish in caves. What kind of world are we leaving for the newly born and yet unborn? What, if anything, can be saved? How do we “make joy/no matter what”? Rumi said, “Look for the answer inside your question.”
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