I’m grateful my new book of climate poems Bridge at the End of the World won a 2023 Blue Light Book Award. An ecopoem celebrates the nonhuman world, and part of humans that is anciently connected to that in our DNA, pre-industrial journeys, and unconscious. Ignoring nonhuman species, or otherwise devaluing them, harms the self, family, society, and world as the climate emergency has shown. To recognize this in global policy, it may unfortunately require larger-scale catastrophes than Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria; recent fires in Canada, Spain, California, Oregon, Siberia, Greece, and Turkey; runaway melting of Greenland ice sheet; potential runaway melting of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier”; drought in East Africa and Central America; Asian and European floods; widespread coral bleaching of Great Barrier Reef; Australia’s 2019-2020 fires that killed or destroyed habitat for nearly three billion animals; 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome in which over “one billion marine intertidal animals may have perished along the shores of the Salish Sea” according University of British Columbia researcher Chris Harley; and estimated nearly eleven billion snow crab that likely died from one or more heat-related reasons off Alaska from 2018 to 2021.
Just like an alcoholic or drug addict who hits bottom before changing course, fossil fuel addiction will not be easily broken in developed nations most responsible. I don’t believe humans have a hidden death wish, as a far-away-in-time-or-space onlooker may imagine, but rather an unacknowledged/unrealized life wish. See my 2014 “Manifesto from Poet on a Dying Planet” for more about this. In my October 10, 2022 post I wrote, “Deactivating Big Oil now will likely be no less dramatic than Deactivation of Hal 9000.”
My favorite recent news items are the 1 minute 14 second video Top scientist [Hans Joachim Schellnhuber] unveils equation showing world in climate emergency from May 11, 2023; Fiona Katauskas’ May 18, 2023 cartoon in The Guardian, Having trouble facing the reality of the climate crisis? Use this tried and tested method.; Bob Berwyn’s May 26, 2023 Inside Climate News article “James Hansen Warns of a Short-Term Climate Shock Bringing 2 Degrees of Warming by 2050”; and May 24, 2023 BBC news video Climate crisis: Where will it be too hot to live? The BBC news video notes by 2100, “at 2.7 degrees [C above 1850 pre-idustrial baseline], what’s expected if the world sticks to it’s current policies, the [‘extreme’] heat-exposed population will be [. . .] around two billion people.” This number is based on the wrong assumption there will be no rapid temperature increase when an “ice-free” Arctic likely happens between 2025 and 2050 as I wrote about in a recent post.
Regarding the above paragraph, this site notes “Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which he founded in 1992.” The current Director is Johan Rockström who noted January 19, 2023 at DAVOS in this 6 minute DW News video, “We’re coming closer to limits of adaptation.” Berwyn’s above article is interesting for several reasons. First, it shows the debate between James Hansen and Michael Mann about effects from loss of “climate-cooling sulfate aerosol particles” as regulations reduced “coal and heavy ship” emissions. Berwyn wrote, “sulfate aerosol particles shielded the planet’s surface from some of the sun’s heat for decades, and cutting them is removing the shield, leading to a rapid warmup.” This is a problem according to Hansen who “posted it publicly on May 19 on a scientific discussion website, again drawing public attention to the potential for a shock of short-term warming that could devastate global food production and ecosystems.” However, Berwyn also wrote Mann said, “Hansen has ‘ignored a decade of new science,’ and that the incorrect claims about climate sensitivity ‘won’t survive peer review.’” Even though Mann is well-known for his 1998 “Hockey Stick” graph, I agree with Zeke Hausfather and Andrew Dessler’s point in Berwyn’s article, “Considering that Jim Hansen’s predictions have often proven correct, it’s important that we pay close attention to what he’s saying.”
It’s also good to pay attention to Inside Climate News as it’s famous for breaking the “Exxon Knew” story, along with The Los Angeles Times.
My March 29, 2020 post “Global Dimming Debate,” (updated November 23, 2021) questions “scope, intensity, timescale, and solutions” regarding “climate-cooling sulfate aerosol particles,” and includes meteorologist Eric Holthaus’ February 8, 2018 Grist article citing this 2018 report in Geophysical Research Letters. The subtitle of Holthaus’ Grist article notes, “We already have planet-cooling technology. The problem is, it’s killing us.”
Juliana v. United States filed by Our Children’s Trust is back on. According to a June 1, 2023 Associated Press article at columbian.com, the 2015 suit was heard by “A three-member panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals [that] dismissed the case in 2020 after finding that [U.S. District Court Judge] Aiken lacked the power to order or design a climate recovery plan sought in the lawsuit. [par break] The plaintiffs then filed an amended complaint asking to change their lawsuit to seek a ruling that the nation’s fossil fuel-based energy system is unconstitutional.”
In my June 26, 2016 interview at The San Diego Union-Tribune, I said, “climate change is such a serious issue, if you are a graphic artist or a musician or an accountant, whatever you are we need your help. For me, being a poet is my way of helping.” Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Chapter 1, “Liberty,” notes, “For the reality of politics, we must go to the poets, not to the politicians.” Some readers said they prefer to order my books from a local bookstore. In that case, Bridge at the End of the World can be ordered using ISBN: 978-1-4218-3540-2 (Distributed by Ingram).
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