Australian Atheists Forum

pipbarber wrote: ↑Wed Sep 27, 2023 8:40 am ...

‘....
The Government can step in to genuinely protect our environment by strengthening the law to put climate at its heart.'

...

But, ... Government does not have a heart. The nation, and the united nations, are pseudo creatures, not actual creatures. As somebody said, 'nations have interests, not morals', and to that can be added not even values, and particularly not conscience. We can build in it pseudo values to this effect but they are reflective of us, not things in themselves.

I have been thinking about Catton's work Overshoot and the main point I would have about it is that he over-estimated human niceness and understated the predicament we are in. He appeared in short to have lacked acquaintance with the First Nations actual experience and the actual experience of enslavement. In short he underestimated human deliberate evil in the succession process. Though he made some references to it, it was too much in passing. Understanding that it is in the interests of the nations to inflict mass death so long as there is differential survival on the inter-national level and also intra-nationally with respect to the wealthy and therefore most valued members, this is actually in their "survival of the fittest" practice. It is, in short, the continuation of genocide by other means, with the opt outs: "the climate did it", "nobody did it", "nobody is to blame", and etc.

A jaw dropping moment in listening to "Overshoot" was in the introduction by overshoot in the forward by Steward Uddal that our technological tools have become our competitors for clean air and clean water. To that may be added for ethanol instead of food.

For me the real thing is to realise listening to the reading by Michael Dowd around Chapters two and three the fact that we are a part of nature is not something to shy away from.

From it I come to my own conclusion that our animalism is in fact our true nature and it is our pretension to improvement and civilisation which is self destructive. I am of course not saying that we do not acknowledge our brains, but we should not imagine that we have bettered our brains by making nylon underwear and nuclear weapons.

Not that long ago we had to frame our arguments thus: "this individual extreme weather event is not unprecedented, things like this happened BEFORE humans pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. We can't say for certain whether this individual event is the result of climate change, although we can say it probably is. What we can say with greater certainty is that the increasing frequency of these events is linked to anthropogenic global warming."

Those days are gone. Now the individual events are themselves so extraordinary they present enough evidence that they are part of climate change caused by human activities. So it is good to see this article about a lying liar who lied again.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ntly-wrong

‘Mutilating the tree of life’: Wildlife loss accelerating, scientists warn
Study finds species groups are going extinct 35 times faster than the previous million years because of human activity


...

“Such mutilation of the tree of life and the resulting loss of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to humanity is a serious threat to the stability of civilisation. Immediate political, economic and social efforts of an unprecedented scale are essential if we are to prevent these extinctions and their societal impacts,” the study found.

Prof Ceballos, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who led the research, told the Guardian that the results were worse than he expected, but said there was still time to act.

“By losing all these genera, we are losing the foundations of the planet to have life in general and human life in particular. If you have a wall made of bricks, if you lose some, it won’t collapse but it won’t be as strong. If you lose many bricks, eventually it will collapse. The combination of the gases in the atmosphere that allows us to have life on the planet depends on plants, animals and organisms. People say that we are alarmist by saying that we expect a collapse. We are alarmist because we are alarmed,” he said.

“As dramatic as the results are, what is important to mention is that we still have time. The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. There is hope but we need to act quickly,” he added.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tists-warn



Reality is that human society in its present format is too divorced from nature to take the measures required and hence it will only be guerilla actions in response. Necessary but inadequate.

I almost want to laugh at the "hopium" clause. It is about public relations and not about science. If you don't say it then people will ignore you or call you an alarmist.

It is a Catch 22. If you lie and say it's not an existential crisis, then people won't take the necessary action. If you tell the truth and spell out how bad it is, people will call you an alarmist or go into panic mode and ignore you... and then they also won't take the necessary action.

wadaye wrote: ↑Sat Sep 30, 2023 11:13 am“As dramatic as the results are, what is important to mention is that we still have time. The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. There is hope but we need to act quickly,” he added.

stylofone wrote: ↑Sat Sep 30, 2023 12:46 pm I almost want to laugh at the "hopium" clause. It is about public relations and not about science. If you don't say it then people will ignore you or call you an alarmist.

It is a Catch 22. If you lie and say it's not an existential crisis, then people won't take the necessary action. If you tell the truth and spell out how bad it is, people will call you an alarmist or go into panic mode and ignore you... and then they also won't take the necessary action.

wadaye wrote: ↑Sat Sep 30, 2023 11:13 am“As dramatic as the results are, what is important to mention is that we still have time. The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. There is hope but we need to act quickly,” he added.

All true but at the same time there is an urgency about actions to reduce species extinctions. Its completely unvalued and in fact despised by the "you can't stop progress" mentality. But, as per https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-gra ... f-progress what we term as progress is turning both the sole habitat, as well as the very bodies of the stock rather than the surplus of wild creatures into our "products". That this includes "pet food" at a time of famine, is indicative of the poverty of imagination and of life in modern industrial society.

wadaye wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2023 9:50 am
All true but at the same time there is an urgency about actions to reduce species extinctions. Its completely unvalued and in fact despised by the "you can't stop progress" mentality. But, as per https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-gra ... f-progress what we term as progress is turning both the sole habitat, as well as the very bodies of the stock rather than the surplus of wild creatures into our "products". That this includes "pet food" at a time of famine, is indicative of the poverty of imagination and of life in modern industrial society.

I was thinking more on the global warming CO2 scale (hard not to, especially on a day like today), but yes I take your point, plenty of species are threatened by shrinking habitats or more specific dangers which could be dealt with, and they are nowhere near as hard to solve as the big bad problem of climate change.

Meanwhile, we could soon have a "football index" of global heating, now that playing a "winter" sport also requires stamina for extreme heat.

https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/the ... al/1537723

From the hairy elephant place:

cstross@wandering.shop
Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop

Key quote from the article: "The entire glacial area Kris refers to is the Amundsen Sea Embayment in the western Antarctic, which would raise sea levels by 10 feet if the Thwaites ice platform and plug were to collapse. It would take the rest of West Antarctica (Thwaites alone holds two feet of SLR) with it)."

That's an imminent 3 metre sea level rise, within single-digit years.

80% of Bangladesh (pop. 200M) live less than 2M above sea level.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9 ... nd-Glacier
Oct 01, 2023, 21:33 · · 0 · 0

From birdsite:

Glen Schaefer
@hardenuppete
Australia is on fire again on Oct 1, 2023
249 warnings across the country.
This is what climate change looks like at 1.6 degrees above long term avg temps.

a (1).jpeg (147.26 KiB) Viewed 1193 times

5:56 AM · Oct 2, 2023
2 Quote Tweets

This bad, this early?

Another 'it's not too late' (apologies if it's already been posted).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... chael-mann

I read the article and a few things occurred to me.

“We haven’t yet exceeded the bounds of viable human civilisation, but we’re getting close,” says Prof Michael Mann. “If we keep going [with carbon emissions], then all bets are off.”

Michael Mann is a bit of a climate science rock star so his opinions count. The above quote suggests this is just another failure to read the politics in the room but then again, confusingly, maybe not.

“When we look to all these past episodes, we come away with a sense that we’re not doomed yet – we have not yet ensured our extinction,” he says. “But if we continue on a fossil fuel-dependent pathway, we will leave that safe range we see in the evidence from past Earth history. That’s what makes this such a fragile moment – we’re at the precipice.”

So the question here is whether the headline is about the end of civilization or human extinction. There's a big difference.

To be fair, one would have to read the book that the interview is based on, and I haven't so that has to be acknowledged. Anyway, he doesn't like doomers:

One motivation for the book, Mann says, is the rise of climate doomism: “We haven’t seen an end to climate denial, but it’s just not plausible any more because people can see and feel that this is happening. So polluters have turned to other tactics and, ironically, one of them has been doomism. If they can convince us it’s too late to do anything, then why do so?”

But this is a strawman. Are fossil fuel promoters going for a doomer vibe? Maybe, but what i see mostly is masses of greenwashing from corporations and their rentboys, not doomism. But maybe i've missed it. In any case, being of a doomer mindset does not mean we should do nothing. Of course we should continue to transition to renewables but we should also understand that it will not be enough to sustain our current economic/social/political system. Therefore, we not only have to continue the Sisyphean transition but we need a politics of adaptation to save as many communities as possible and it's there that the infrastructure of transition will come in handy.

Probably at this point we'd need a very clear definition of 'civilisation.' I do wonder sometimes whether 'civilisation' is code for neoliberal capitalism, neocolonialism and advanced world lifestyles of the wealthiest 10%. If so, doomism is a very positive space to be in, and i personally recommend it broadly.