[MCN] I'll make once-weekly posts here

[Lance Olsen]

Because all aspects of climate are deeply tangled with the economy, and because the economy is always and everywhere a political animal, expect some posts on climate and some on climate-related economics  and some on climate-related politics.

The form of posts will vary, sometimes a quick list or mini-anthology of excerpts from a number of articles on the same topic, sometimes an excerpt from a single analysis. 

At bottom, the set of conditions we summarize as climate have already been worsening, will continue to worsen to at least some extent no matter what we do, and limiting the extent of worsening will require unprecedented efforts and sacrifices across all sectors of society in an alarmingly short time. There’s high risk of failure due to unpopularity of the necessary and the simple, psychological classic, resistance to change.

Now for this week’s post. In the paragraph below, substitute economic systems where the authors refer to ecological systems, and economy where the authors refer to ecosystem:

“Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence."

Barnovsky et al. Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature Volume 486, 07 June 2012
<<https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11018>>

PS - Summer heat will bring news reports about risk to Montana's fish as rivers and their tributaries heat up, and there may be some fatalities

********************
"An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well 
and does not want to be told otherwise.”

Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac

###################

"But the scale of climate change engulfs even the most fortunate. There is now no weather we haven’t touched, no wilderness immune from our encroaching pressure. The world we once knew is never coming back.

"I have no hope that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children <https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-should-never-have-called-it-earth> to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief.

"We need courage, not hope."

Kate Marvel, physicist, climate scientist, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics

<<https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/ <https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/>>>




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