How Long…Has This Been Going On?
One single image paints a devastatingly shocking portrait not just of the speed with which climate change is taking place, but of the horrifying reality of it not being addressed in time. Many people would actually wholeheartedly accept the science would likely be shocked by this revelation which, paradoxically, almost also sounds like a made-up fact by climate change deniers:
“Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning in eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld.”
Temp-Controlled Thermostat
Humans—indeed, all mammals—exist only as the result of thermostat that is rigidly controlled by a very narrow temperature range. Dial that thing too far and the result is devastation beyond imagination:
"At seven degrees of warming…a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out..at just five degrees…whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans. At six…New York City would be hotter than present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots”
“Forest Dieback”
Forest dieback is the term for the decline of country-sized jungle basins and the retreat of sprawling forests that becomes the finger which flicks over a domino. That one action unleashes an inexorable cause-and-effect dynamic which eventually leads to an entire room once filled with dominos standing on end now collapsed flat on their back. The imagery of the book does a much better job of explaining things:
“forest dieback...means a dramatic stripping-back of the planet’s natural ability to absorb carbon and turn it into oxygen, which means still hotter temperatures…Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still…A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on.”
Economic Inequality and Climate Change
One doesn’t usually connect the enormous gap in economic disparity between the haves and have-nots when discussing the consequences of climate change, but like other aspect of the social condition, eventually the wealth gap cannot be escaped. The wildfires of California provide opportunity for imagery to point out how once things start really going south, it will only ironically stoke the fires of division:
“On local golf courses, the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy. The following year, Americans watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the state reliant on conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day.”
