Yesterday someone from my climate action (distant) past read my first blog post in this series and their response was a skeptical “Wow.” Which I totally buy. I mean, as I lampshade, I may well have gone sliding off the deep end into doomerism. I certainly hope I have and that we can all have a chuckle 18 months hence at just how unhinged I had gotten in June-July 2023, just how scared of my own shadow etc
It’s not that some elite figures aren’t saying what’s pretty clear – so the Secretary General of the United Nations is saying climate change is out of control. The ‘hottest week ever’ thing is getting traction in major newspapers.
And it is all adding up to zero action (of course), but also, it seems, zero panic on the part of ‘normal’ people. People go to work, or the tennis, or the cricket or whatever. I doubt outside the mouths of activists and scientists, anyone says anything much about what is unfolding. What is there to say? We were warned, we didn’t take action, now it’s the age of consequences. And the consequences will vary in their severity, at least initially (for months/years, hopefully decades), and money will be a cushion in the early stages. But overall, it won’t be. The scifi novels are full of people who thought they had a bolthole, only for it to turn out that their guards betray them, or their equipment brakes down. Getting to New Zealand won’t be that easy, and New Zealand will go through gnarly shit as well…
Ugh. It’s so exhausting to think like this, like carrying round a huge stone (or ushing it up a mountain). And there’s nothing to be done about it, so I am sure most ‘therapists’ etc would say just ignore it, just pretend it isn’t happening. Would that I could take that advice. Or is the stone now constitutive of me? Have I wrapped myself so tiglty into these narratives of collapse and disaster that I’d fall over if they weren’t there?
There is a third path, between denial and freezing, the ‘feel the fear but do it anyway’ line. That requires discipline, courage, clarity. NO wonder I struggle…
But on a serious note, this process – of writing most mornings, of just putting words on the page, has helped me, I think to – psychobabble alert! – ‘process’ these feelings. Or at least to intellectualise them, which is close enough to the same thing, for my current purposes. I don’t know if it has helped you, gentle reader? The thoughts (if they deserve such a label) are too unfiltered, unprocessed, unpolished and unrefined to be worth that much, I know. Others better articulate this confusion, ths hesitancy as the ANtropese/capitolocene pummels us, swallows us. THis sense of frozen disbelief, that we could have – against all our self-adverts – hae been so short-sighted, so foolish as to have walked straight into a disaster we’d been warned about for decades.
And yet, here we are….
Right two pretty graphs. This one below i apparently using slightly dodgy (or overly-cleansed) data, but it’s “pretty” and it tells you that, well, it’s heating up, isn’t it? Not that humans, prey to shifting baseline syndrome, can really ‘get it’, it seems.
That blue line is mesmerising, isn’t it?
Apparently yesterday’s global 2m average temperature was 17.23, a new new record. These numbers are both representative of something terribly real and simultaneously hopelessly abstract.
God I hope I am laughing heartily at present self in eighteen months’ time. Saying “wow” and shaking my head.
marchudson.net 
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