I am not sure that people so much fall for easy answers as let them blossom inside them. The manure of desperate desire for a solution where “I am not to blame” is always present.
The world is difficult, navigating it is full of pitfalls, ones hope and dreams tumble down those holes. That’s what’s falling. What rises up is the desire for this to, truly, be the fault of someone else.
Scapegoating was an important religious practice after all: it’s something that can give great succour.
To conclude, I honestly think that you don’t have to give people an in-group and an out-group. They will happily make those themselves if you let them. But giving such ideas legitimacy so they become popular currency certainly helps to create a mass movement.
Well, yes, this is natural thing that happens in people’s minds. It was more the second half of the sentence that disheartens me; that the political system has allowed a virulent, emotional national dualism to take over and prevent much of anything from being accomplished. Instead, we get to watch an endless opera of pointless conflict over philosophical questions are that unresolvable. In the US, this isn’t so much the case on the local level of government because the people (both political actors and voters) generally ignore local politics, so the elected officials and bureaucrat are able to conduct more normal business. Thus, we see all sorts of renewable energy policies coming from the lower levels of our government and industry, but on the national level its a giant car pileup, metaphorically speaking.
I’m no expert – and neither am I infinitely prolonged – but from the standpoint of my limited experience and wisdom, human systems tend towards self-perpetuation more than anything else.
As you say, this is top-down, not bottom-up. Some people at the top of one mountain see it crumbling due to demographic change and a purposeful relinquishment of decency, and dangit they’ll keep shouting made up swear-words at the rising tide until it gives up! CRAMBLING FUDGECLOAKS.
Beautifully said, Bhante. As someone who used to work on Wall Street and now works for a small non-profit helping our community I can vouch for the soul-destroying quality of work that leads to harm. One numbs to the actual consequences of what one is doing and becomes attached to the little ego gratifications the system provides to its minions.
Scientists say that almost 95% of all sea-bed marine life in the Avacha Bay has been completely wiped out by the mysterious tragedy.
No matter the cause, the event sparked a public outcry as Russians begin to wake up to the harmful effects of climate change.
What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”
That last sentence is like, the entire history of the tech industry right there.
They’re out there but they’re in the US government, not Greenpeace.
As the Washington Post revealed Friday, the administration uses its four-degree warming estimate to argue that eliminating 8 billion tons worth of emissions won’t be enough to change the climate outlook, by itself, so the federal government shouldn’t bother.
After all, the entire world would need to make enormous cuts in emissions to avert catastrophic warming — and that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
The Town That Went Feral article is almost a case study of ignorance delusion denial and induced disaster, affecting a region wider than that town, and highlighting some uncomfortable realities about habitat destruction, and different mitigation options for the affluent vs the poor.
The COVID Women Changemakers article is something else; snapshots of indivduals’ diverse efforts to help suffering people, in various geographies and cultures.
Civilization adaption imo involves change in the nitty-gritty day-to-day manifestations of greed, hate, delusions, ignorance… and their remedies.
As a whole, yes. The US government currently is more like a Jekyll and Hyde entity. The White House doesn’t believe climate change is real. The bureaucrats who wrote the report (which is quite well done, I skimmed it), on the other hand are educated intelligent people who probably do. And existing law requires that actual science be the basis for policymaking. So, the report has a large and very well researched chapter on the reality of climate change based on the IPCC (starts on page 162). But the White House is forcing them to rescind the fuel efficiency requirements regardless that were put in place during the previous administration. So, they write the report as required by law and set the new policy anyway. That’s the kind of absurdity we’ve had taking place for the past three years.
Scientists are concerned the delayed freeze could amplify feedbacks that accelerate the decline of the ice cap. It is already well known that a smaller ice sheet means less of a white area to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. But this is not the only reason the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average.
The Laptev Sea is known as the birthplace of ice, which forms along the coast there in early winter, then drifts westward carrying nutrients across the Arctic, before breaking up in the spring in the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard. If ice forms late in the Laptev, it will be thinner and thus more likely to melt before it reaches the Fram Strait. This could mean fewer nutrients for Arctic plankton, which will then have a reduced capacity to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
More open sea also means more turbulence in the upper layer of the Arctic ocean, which draws up more warm water from the depths.
Dr Stefan Hendricks, a sea ice physics specialist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, said the sea ice trends are grim but not surprising. “It is more frustrating than shocking. This has been forecast for a long time, but there has been little substantial response by decision-makers.”
“A report released this week from Human Rights Watch says that Canada’s changing climate is making it harder for Indigenous people to support themselves on the land. Unpredictable weather and changing conditions are disrupting wildlife habitats, causing available food resources to decline and making it more dangerous for Indigenous people to harvest food.“
“ The experiences of First Nations described in this report are illustrative of broader climate change impacts across Canada, however, each First Nation is unique, and none of their experiences can be generalized, making it imperative to tailor measures to address climate impacts and community needs in each of their traditional territories,"
There comes a time when, after a very long period has passed, this cosmos contracts. As the cosmos contracts, sentient beings are mostly headed for the realm of streaming radiance. There they are mind-made, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, moving through the sky, steadily glorious, and they remain like that for a very long time. DN1
Bhikkhus, this saṃsara is without discoverable beginning. A first point is not discerned of beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving.
…
There comes a time, bhikkhus, when the great earth burns up and perishes and no longer exists, but still, I say, there is no making an end of suffering for those beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving. SN22.99
This has been a hanging threat for a long time; given the incredible heat in the Arctic recently it comes as no surprise. If I’m not mistaken, due to the level of uncertainty, these feedback effects were not factored in to the former IPCC models, and thus constitute extra forcing on top of them. The next report is due next year, we’ll see how it handles them then.
Meanwhile, we can keep an eye on the global methane trends. Unlike CO2 we don’t see a steady pattern of acceleration; the increase has been a bit up and down. It slowed from roughly 1992 to 2006, but the last few years seem to show an acceleration.
When the white surface is replaced by a dark open ocean, more heat is absorbed and less light is reflected. According to a new study in Nature Communications , this feedback loop could add 0.19 degrees Celsius to the global temperature by mid-century, nearly wiping out the temperature effect of China going carbon neutral.
As someone who used to work on Wall Street and now works for a small non-profit helping our community I can vouch for the soul-destroying quality of work that leads to harm. One numbs to the actual consequences of what one is doing and becomes attached to the little ego gratifications the system provides to its minions.
.png/1920px-Annual_greenhouse_gas_index_(1980-2017).png)
