Climate Crisis
by simon · updated 2mo ago
Climate Crisis
by simon · updated 2mo ago
simon added 2mo ago
simon added 3mo ago
Climate scientists have a saying that “carbon is forever”1. While natural sinks will absorb about half of what we emit today over the next century, it takes on the order of 400,000 years for the carbon cycle to fully remove current emissions. The extremely long atmospheric lifetime of CO2 means that even if we get emissions down to zero, warming wi
... See moresimon added 3mo ago
At the core of most of our cocoons are the concepts and frameworks that have been dictated by the sense that capitalism (in it’s more colloquial broader sense that includes deregulation, imperialism and globalization) is the only viable economic and political system. This has been termed a “monomyth” - a singular myth that like a monoculture planta
... See moresimon added 4mo ago
"Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all [now nearly twice] the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," ecologist Jeff Dukes explained.
In another calculation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Rev
... See moresimon added 4mo ago
Since that study was written we’ve burned over 50% again the cumulative amount of fossil fuels. Which means the amount of fossil fuels we’ve burned is equivalent to if we set fire to all the plants and algae grown on Earth every year for over 21,000 years. No wonder it’s getting hot.
simon added 4mo ago
Analyzing the language we use to describe climate change is particularly urgent, according to Dr. Stibbe, as our words directly influence how we tackle it. For example, the neutral-sounding term “anthropogenic climate change” collapses human responsibility for the climate crisis into a neat, innocuous noun. “There’s no actual agents doing anything,
... See moresimon added 4mo ago
One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaste
... See moresimon added 4mo ago
Today, we increasingly understand that climate change and other sustainability challenges are internal, relationship crises. They result from modern societies’ story of separation. This story assumes that we are all separate from each other, that some humans are superior to other humans, and that human beings are both separate and superior to the r
... See moresimon added 4mo ago