On Fire!

The images from the Toronto flood are astounding considering it derived purely from a rainstorm - not a huge hurricane like Sandy, or several rivers overflowing with snow melt.

Meanwhile, although no one puts it together, the country is awash in local news stories about trees falling.

These screenshots are from video in Chicago, a spectacle now becoming so familiar and typical that people are inured to the unprecedented damage being done to houses, cars and power lines.

Reporters scurry from neighborhood to neighborhood, showing the destruction without ever noting that the trees are rotten inside.  No doubt they have no idea air pollution is causing it.

The Landslide Blog has up-to-the-minute video and satellite from the latest disasters in India and China.  Of course the precipitation is heavier now - but logging, development, and widespread decline of vegetation from tropospheric ozone are no doubt playing a role as well.

Meanwhile Las Vegas is roasting within easy sight of a wildfire which "is burning through dead trees and dense pinion pine".

 This morning I got a compliment (I think!) from another commenter over at Nature Bats Last:

The main premise of Guy McPherson's blog is that we are headed for near term extinction (NTE) and so the guest essays and much of the discussion that ensures are generally about how it will transpire, and strategies for coping with such terrible knowledge - often alone.

B9K9 Says: 

July 11th, 2013 at 6:32 am

Gail, you are absolutely on fire. Out of all the great commenters hanging out in this space, you’re the one who’s artfully linking all the pieces together. Perhaps it’s just my analytical background, but I really appreciate an ability to pull together disparate threads of history/facts in order to build a picture of a cohesive whole.

In fact, your recent run of comments appears to have enough substance to run a blog along similar lines as your ‘friend’ Orlov. You’ve got the perspective on all the key inputs to put out fresh material every 3-4 days. If I make one suggestion, just dump the weepy shit about dying trees & leaves falling and move into top level NTE geo-politics that is already in play.

If you can just make the last leap to embrace the notion that there’s a lot of other people who understand perfectly well what is occurring, and have been busy little beavers setting up the infrastructure to support a legal state in which to preserve control during the coming dark ages, I dare say you’d be a major hit.

The beauty of linking the past with the present (and future) is that it gives you ample topical material in which to publish fresh commentary/observations on the ever increasing & obvious movements afoot.

He wrote that in response to what I wrote earlier:

Gail Says: 

July 10th, 2013 at 2:06 pm

Rob said:

“..but extinction of everything is inevitable given a long enough time-line, therefore, our existance has always been meaningless.”

Refreshingly true – but, most people don’t agree that the extinction of everything is inevitable, because it’s antithetical to their belief that that they possess an eternal soul…or if not that precisely, that some sort of unifying cosmic spirit exists beyond the material world.

That is why NTE is so challenging, because it makes it pretty clear that humans invented consciousness for various evolutionarily beneficial purposes – along with pixies and the tooth fairy and unicorns.

So for those people who are educated enough to understand that indeed, extinction is inevitable for us “special” humans, and quite possibly looming in the near term, there appears to be an endless variety of contortions engaged in to reconcile the two – the existence of some kind of “spirituality” or “consciousness” and the pending lack of any more people to speculate on such anthropogenic notions.

Concurrently there is a powerful urge to blame some external influence for this tragic and ignoble end, because apparently, admitting that we are all complicit also makes it difficult to pretend that humans are special and deserving of something better than the unspeakable maurauding that will surely ensue when the grid goes down and the grocery store shelves are empty.

So Mike K can say:

“Now it may be objected that here and there tribes did develop small localized cultures capable of relatively long term sustainability. This may have transpired, although the truth of those ancient days is largely obscured by the passage of time.”

“Largely obscured” is no doubt true in the sense that far more of the past has been obliterated than has been preserved. However, a remarkable amount has been preserved, and it’s really quite enough for the experts who study it to determine that humans have been “unsustainable” all throughout our history, not merely since the advent of agriculture or capitalism. In fact, recent research has revealed that agriculture emerged independently in several different places in the world, at around the same time. So it’s not some aberrant trait humans could have skipped. It is US, it is who we evolved to be.

Chris Hedges is a great writer and a courageous reporter who a greatly admire, but I would not be the first to observe that he is in the sway of magic too (why else would he be proclaiming a dystopian future on an uninhabitable planet and continue to have children?), which is why Rob’s sentence fits so perfectly with the link:

“The deep healing required to recover from this madness is contained in various spiritual paths…”

It’s absurd (and I mean that in a very affectionate way). The very ability of humans to indulge in fantasy – a genetic ability to lie to ourselves and each other in order to obtain that which makes us fat and happy – is what has led us down the path to perdition. Invoking spirituality to save us from what believing in spirituality has led to is not going to produce the desired results – any more than relying on technology to save us from what technology has produced, which is faster rates of extraction and pollution.

Even the most scientifically illuminated are spell-bound by dream solutions. It’s embargoed till tomorrow watch for the Climate News Network to release their analysis of two studies, which begins with the utterly ludicrous assertion:

“Two separate groups of researchers say there are grounds for hope that the world can escape the prospect of a possibly uncontrollable and very damaging level of climate change. But they agree that world governments will have to meet rigorous conditions to make this happen.”

When I read such nonsense I feel like either I am going insane, or the world is insane; or both. Daniel you raised some provocative questions and that is my answer.

Gail Says: 
July 11th, 2013 at 6:12 am

Bob S. – yes that’s the same release I was referring to embargoed yesterday that struck me as total insanity – haven’t they heard of Jevon’s paradox? The world is drifting into such delusion and cognitive dissonance, it would be vastly amusing if only I didn’t care. To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t have children I likely wouldn’t care, or at least not nearly so much. It’s getting harder to laugh when every day there are more disasters – floods and landslides and wildfires – and riots in the streets are getting closer as the agricultural failure looms.

Luna – atheism is not a religion. By any metric you choose to define religion, atheism isn’t. That is sort of like what climate deniers say to environmentalists – if you really wanted clean energy you’d be in favor of nuclear power. A little humor on the subject!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix_cWWVuG1o (and lest anyone feel Bill Maher is offensive, he recently produced a really terrific “climate change for dummies” on HBO Vice called “The World Is Sinking” that is perfect for your Republican brother-in-law, it’s on youtube.)

Like you, I find the universe a vast and mysterious place, so vast and mysterious that I feel no need to imbue it with any more vastly mysterious and wondrous properties than it already physically possesses. If people find they need more than that to get them through the day, or excuse our frequently horrible behavior, it’s certainly a popular choice. But it isn’t based on reality (which I define as testable, empirical scientific facts).

Mike K., I do find many aspects of humanity inspiring and delightful, because I’m human – but “truth, love, giving, beauty, awe” and so forth are not “immaterial” things. Neuroscientists may not know yet precisely how all those human feelings are produced by chemicals or synapses or whatever, but to a growing extent they are finding that they are quantifiable and measurable. People with certain kinds of brain damage or congental defects, for instance, don’t have the same emotional affects depending on which part of the brain is impaired. So there is a source for that, and it is material, not ethereal.

When the last person dies, will there be any more love or awe? Of course not. It will die with the last person, just like Thor died with the last Viking…and so will “spirituality” evaporate, however you prefer to define it for the purposes of living now.

I still kind of think writing about trees dying from pollution has value - for several reasons, the main one being that nobody else is.  I dearly wish someone else would!  Then I could stop and find something more pleasant to do with my remaining days in this life.  I also have a stubborn fondness for the truth, and since the implications of trees dying are huge - for climate, for our food supply, for wildlife - it seems like a worthy subject.  There are so many other catastrophists cataloguing the many paths to ruination, much better than I could.

At least, I'm glad B9K9 confined his description of Wit's End as "weeping" about dying trees, because if he'd said "sniveling" or "whining" that would have been worse, and besides it would have had sexist connotations.  Maybe weeping does too.  B9K9 may be correct that the powers that be are well aware of the imminence of collapse, and are fascistically preparing to survive it by readying the FEMA camps and stocking up on ammunition.  I tend to think they are just as likely to have the denial gene as everyone else but heck, all they'd have to do is watch the video embedded below from the History Channel (which, incredibly, has received only 14,900 views)!

"Prophets of Doom" presents a decent overview of the multitude of converging catastrophes (except trees of course!), well worth the hour and a half to watch, especially for neophytes unfamiliar with the issues.  But I couldn't help being taken aback by the introduction, with the narrator's deep voice intoning ominously that all throughout the history of empires, visionary men have warned of impending collapse and yet been ignored by the public and the leaders of the day.  And then it goes on to interview several men about their vision of apocalyptic collapse.  It was so obviously lacking a female voice that I couldn't help thinking that maybe if I was a man, more people would take seriously the threat to trees - and existence - that is the subject of this blog.  You think?  Should I change my name to William?