- Tragedy:
- A drama or literary work in which the main character is
brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a
tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable
circumstances.
- -- definition of tragedy
by The Free Dictionary (emphasis mine)
I'm really not sure where to put the cut tag on this post. Today I'm
talking about Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy [PDF],
by Professor Jem Bendell.
The author has a link to resources on emotional support in the sidebar of his home page. As I
said back on Sunday, it's a pulling-no-punches prediction of the likely
consequences of global warming.
Links and some commentary have been seen elsewhere on my DW reading list
(fayanora, siliconshaman, ysabetwordsmith). ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ysabetwordsmith points out that
Very little of this is actually new; what's new is that some people are
actually listening this time.
It's pretty clear that the paper is an attempt to shock enough people into
listening to make a difference. Um... is this the right place to mention
that this is The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to
Therapy? Probably.
Okay, I think that's enough of a warning. Please consider your
headspace before proceeding, and maybe find a cat or a stuffie to hold,
because it's that bad. ( We are very screwed. )
There's some support from this study, Deadly heatwaves could affect 74 percent of the world’s
population (The paper is under a
paywall, but the abstract is free.) The maps are frightening. That 74%
figure is for 2100 if emissions continue to rise at their current rate.
With "aggressive" reduction (and I don't know whether that means to zero
emissions -- I doubt it) it's 48%. And see above about feedback. And
don't forget Bitcoin!
The same group points out that Greenhouse gas [is] triggering more changes than we can handle
because it's more than just heat waves -- there are other changes going on
that are usually studied separately rather than together.
Scared yet? I don't know -- nobody knows, really -- whether Bendell's
most extreme predictions are true, nor what the timescale will really turn
out to be. The bottom line, though, is things are worse than most people
think, and getting worse faster than anticipated in the
studies that led to the 2-degree rise by 2100 target.
I don't profess to understand much of the "Deep Adaptation" section of the
paper. It gets into politics, sociology, and psychology, none of which
are my strong points. But the main point is that we need to make drastic
changes at a societal level, based on the certainty that things will get
worse, and the high probability that they will get much worse.
We might be able to save civilization, if we can stop making
things worse and adapt quickly enough to the changes we can't stop.
If we can't, well, at least the tardigrades will probably make it through.
I'm not so sure about the cockroaches.
