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10/13/2022
Climate Chaos
It’s time that we look at this thing called Climate Change for what it is. The same with the term Global Warming.
These are friendly sounding words. Climate and Change. Climates have always changed, usually far slower than what is occurring now but changing nonetheless.
Global warming. What’s not to like about things getting warmer. Longer growing season, more sunny days. Not so bad.
The reality is that what is occurring now is not simply change nor a warming trend.
It is chaos. Climate Chaos to be specific and the world is feeling it now. No more politically convenient denial and no more complacency.
The storms are getting stronger, the fires are getting hotter, the floods are getting higher, the tornadoes are becoming more frequent, species migrations are getting disrupted, snowpacks and glaciers are being diminished, the permafrost is melting and belching more and more methane as the Antarctic and Arctic ice are experiencing an accelerated melting.
We are seeing the climate disruption causing unprecedented migration of peoples from the tropics as their eco-systems are ravaged by drought, famine, pestilence and war.
We are seeing the emergence of more and more zoonotic transmitted viruses and the release of long dormant pathogens from the thawing permafrost.
Disasters and Reduction of Resources
With headlines this week reporting "Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals. Huge scale of human-driven loss of species demands urgent action, say world’s leading scientists." are warnings we need to heed.
Florida, Puerto Rico, Haiti and many other Caribbean nations are being, and will continue to be, pummeled by super storms and by 2040, these places will be essentially unlivable.
Many Pacific island nations will also be unlivable as rising seas inundate their lands forcing an exodus of millions of people elsewhere.
Borders will be stormed with desperate people fleeing from southern nations, from Africa, from Central America, from Oceana, from Southeast Asia.
These mass migrations will present a national security threat to many other nations.
And these nations North of the Tropic of Cancer and South of the Tropic of Capricorn will also see the ravages of climate chaos with increased forest and wildfires, floods, drought and tornadoes.
Resources will become diminished as water availability is diminished.
Buying an electric car is not going to solve the problem.
Wars will become more common as nations fight over possession of water and resources like lithium, fossil fuels, rare earth metals, and uranium.
This is the present reality and sugar coating it with convenient greenwashing lies ain’t going to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box.
We popped that lid decades ago.
So, is it all doom and gloom?
In the face of climate chaos what can we do?
We can see the world from a different perspective, from a biocentric perspective.
This means understanding the value of diversity of species, the value of interdependence of species and accepting the reality that there is a limit to carrying capacity meaning there is a limit to growth.
The answer to an impossible problem is to find the impossible solution.
We know what factors are the cause of climate chaos. We need to shut off those factors by ending dependence on fossil fuels, by stopping the industrialized production of meat, fish, and chemically intensive agriculture.
We have to stop the extermination of the engineers that keep our life support system stabilized and running smoothly.
Phytoplankton and Life
The worms, the trees, the bees, the fish, the whales and most importantly the phytoplankton in the sea that produces up to 70% of the oxygen we breathe and sequesters enormous amounts of carbon.
Since 1950, over 40% of the phytoplankton in the Ocean has been diminished. That is the single most destructive development on our planet since the last major mass extinction event.
If phytoplankton disappears from the sea, the reality is that we all die!
We do not live on this planet without phytoplankton and phytoplankton is nurtured by the nutrients provided by whales, seabirds, fish and other aquatic species – nutrients like iron, magnesium and nitrogen found in the fecal contributions of all these species.
Where have the insects gone? Where has the beneficial microbes in the soil gone? Eradicated by bactericides, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides.
For decades we have systematically poisoned the soil, the water, the air and the living cells of the biosphere – including ourselves.
We spend trillions creating diseases that we then spend trillions on the industry of curing these diseases.
Look at it this way.
This planet is a spaceship hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour on a voyage around the Milky Ways Galaxy that takes 250 million years to complete.
And on this beautiful jewel of a spaceship there exists a marvelous life support system that provides all our needs – the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink and regulates climate and temperature.
And this complex life support system is maintained by a crew of living things, the engineers, all those species that do the real work making sure the machinery does not break down.
We humans are not crewmembers. We are passengers having a wonderful time amusing ourselves including spending a great deal of our time committing the mass murder of essential engineers.
And with the diminishment of the engineers, the phytoplankton, the trees, worms, bees, bacteria and so many millions of other creatures, so is diminished the life support system.
And if we don’t stop our violent extermination of the engineers that keep us all alive, we will be the victims of ecological collapse just as so many people now are becoming victims of climate chaos caused by the murder of the engineers on this spaceship Earth.
The choice is between taking action or letting action take us.
Worldwide fisheries are collapsing, we are losing healthy topsoil with the destruction of the microbes, worms, and insects. We are losing the pollinators. We are losing both the green and the blue lungs of the planet, the temporal, boreal and rainforests and the once great mass production of Phyto and Zooplankton.
This means learning to live in harmony with our engineers.
We don’t have to do much to save life on this planet, we just need to allow the engineers to do their essential work and that means the killing, the plundering and ignorant greed needs to end.
We need to stop seeing ourselves as superior, dominant and special. We are not. We are primates sharing this planet with species far more important than we are.
We have become an extremely self- centered, arrogant naked ape that has become some sort of divine legend in our own minds.
We need to shake off that delusion and we need to embrace and protect our fellow earthlings, especially the essential engineers because they don’t need us but we sure as hell need them.
And we are not totally useless as passengers. Recently we saw how we could protect the planet with our technological skills by deflecting a planet killing asteroid which is bound to target us at some point in the future. In so doing we will be able to repay the stupendous debt we owe to all those important species that keep us alive.
If we take care of them, they will take care of us.
As Henry David Thoreau once observed, in our life styles we need to simplify, simplify, simplify and that means using what we need and not succumbing to our greed.
Captain Paul Watson