Guest Column: The Cancer of Global Warming (cont’d.)

(This is part two of a 2 part commentary. See yesterday’s Orcas Issues for part one)

— by Joe Symons of NegawattMedia.com —

There is only one question that needs to be asked, regardless of your age or occupation. Whether you are a school teacher or administrator, an employee, a parent or grandparent, a voter, retired or a student, whether you work for a corporation or a non-profit, whether you are religious or an atheist, regardless of the color of your skin or the language you speak or your sexual orientation, whether you are in the military or a civilian, there is only one question: what are you doing to prepare yourself, your workmates, your children, your home/community/city/county for a 4D to 6D habitat?

Huh? The “D” here stands for degree and the degrees are in Centigrade. They reference an average global temperature 4 to 6 degrees C warmer than what the founding fathers experienced. The term comes from the IEA (google it). They use the term “4DS” to mean 4 Degree Scenario. So far no one wants to pencil out what a 4DS or a 6DS world will actually look and feel like. That’s because they don’t know. Haven’t been there before. The docs can tell you what an Ice Age will pencil out like. They can’t tell you what a 6DS Patient Earth will be.

Dan Kammen, a Nobel Prize winning member of the IPCC, said back in 2012: “while scientists rightly talk about the 2° line, the path the world is currently on, namely 4 – 6°C will be catastrophic.”https://www.greatenergychallengeblog.com/2012/12/18/after-disappointment-at-doha-time-for-action-on-climate-change/

The closest way to imagine a 4 -6°C world is to imagine how you would feel if your body temperature were elevated by 4-6° F (permanently). If you’re up a degree, you don’t feel well. Up 2 degrees and you definitely have a fever. Up 3 degrees, (101 something) and you don’t go to work. Up 4 degrees (102 something) and you are calling the doctor. Up 5 degrees and you are heading for an ICU if you are still alive. This is a rough gauge of how Patient Earth will work. Greater and greater devastating storms. Whole swaths of the American Bread basket toast. Summer temps that are triple digit for weeks or months. Rolling blackouts. More coal fire power plants you say to run those o so needed air conditioners? More CO2 means even hotter temps. That’s not going to fly. And then there is that pesky water problem. Nuclear plants need water too.

https://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/11/20/000406484_20141120084055/Rendered/PDF/927040v10WP00O0sh0Executive0Summary.pdf

Unless… you get that Patient Earth health checkup fast and then do the Patient Earth cancer equivalent: major chemo, major surgery, major radiation. Fast. She gets hot: you get sick. Does she care? No.

A way of imagining how Patient Earth works is to compare it to the internet. From something that didn’t exist in the 1950’s and didn’t get popular until the late 1980’s, the internet is now global with hundreds of millions of servers and billions of users. Everyone is connected to everyone. A disturbance (think virus or malware) that originates in someone’s bedroom can disrupt information on millions of computers anywhere on the planet, not over the timeframe of a year but of a day. Depending on the infection vectors and the payload of the virus, millions could lose lifetimes of creative work. We are now developing the internet of Things. Instead of just your laptop and maybe your cellphone, you’ll also have half the items in your house (refrigerator, thermostat, dryer, automobile) and body parts (insulin dispensers, on-board heart monitors and pacemakers, drug monitors and dispensers, etc.) on the net. This growing ecosystem only works if everyone pretty much stays in their lane. If a rule-breaking disruption occurs, the system will degrade. If the rule-breaking disruption is severe enough, the system will fail.

Patient Earth’s biosphere is a net. Some of it is connected wirelessly. Much is connected biologically at a level of size and scale that is entirely incomprehensible. It is a net that has been constructed over millions of years. It is robust enough as long as the fundamental physics doesn’t change. The PE biosphere net has resilience boundaries. Exceed the boundaries, the net will start to fail. How fast? How deep? How permanently? No one knows. What we do know is that once an organism is dead, it’s dead. What we don’t know is how much wiggle room we have at the edge. We have experience with cancer. We have zero experience with Patient Earth fevers.

One of the most famous lines uttered by Harry Callahan, of Dirty Harry fame, was …here’s Wikipedia’s take:

While in a local diner, Callahan sees a bank robbery in progress and, alone with his revolver, he kills two of the robbers and wounds a third, challenging the man lying near a loaded shotgun:

I know what you’re thinking: “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well do ya, punk?

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Harry)

So, in all our excitement to burn fossil fuels, knowing full well that we alone are causing Patient Earth’s fever, and it is getting worse, and it will run it’s thousand year course (no antibiotics, no homeopathic remedies), and we’ve never seen Patient Earth this sick before, we have to ask ourselves, “Do We feel Lucky?”

The mythology I referenced earlier was one of subdue the earth. Since we’ve been surprisingly good at this, we’ve moved from gratitude for the bounty of the earth to an entitlement to the resources of the earth. Earth was there for us. For centuries there was no pushback. Earth seemed limitless and the consequences of taking were either unknown or minimal or manageable. That this mythology was immature was trumped by it’s apparent success. We were our own crack dealers supplying to ourselves. Unsupervised kids in the candy store. Like the robber in Dirty Harry, a fossil-fuel driven technology will get you almost anything. That is, until our failure to understand physics causes Patient Earth to get sick enough to change the food, weather and comfort game.

Kids don’t vote. Kids don’t have the wisdom or knowledge or experience base of adults. They are dependent and relatively speaking powerless in the terms of the current mythology. We developed-nation adults are not walking whatever talk we imagine about the need to downsize our carbon addiction anywhere fast and deep enough to alter Patient Earth’s accumulating and descending fever. Since Her fever will take decades to manifest it’s full portrait—what we see today is a mere black and white sketch at the edges of the canvas—we are committing genocide on our descendants. Since this is a time-based homicide, it is as if we were shooting very very slow bullets at them from our automatic weapons. Those bullets will take 20 to 30 years to reach their targets. That is too long for us to experience sensorily. We have to experience our pulling the trigger today and sending those bullets out today as seriously as we experience the words of the doctor pointing to the MRI and the X rays and the blood tests and telling us we waited too long.