I’m gonna have to stop reading soon. I need to go to bed, and I will need to be able to sleep then. “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP, and according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be $20 trillion richer Continue Reading
This is horrific:“In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 25-26). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. This just in from a phone call Continue Reading
“If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we Continue Reading
Back to the Wallace-Wells book, on “Feedback loops”: “A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which Continue Reading
“This is what is often called the problem of environmental justice; a sharper, less gauzy phrase would be “climate caste system.” The problem is acute within countries, even wealthy ones, where the poorest are those who live in the marshes, the swamps, the floodplains, the inadequately irrigated places with the most vulnerable infrastructure—altogether an unwitting environmental apartheid. Wallace-Wells, David. The Continue Reading
After the past two days (the events of Tuesday, and the “day after” emotional experiences) and numbness and raw anger and uncertainty about the future (along with hopes for the possibilities that might arise from this wreckage), I am , today, in a kind of “debilitated” mode, finding it hard to shake off and move ahead, particularly since I have Continue Reading
LOL…funny, and poignantly relevant to the UMC, and the “Traditional Plan”