Since last July, Earth’s average temperature has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
As global temperatures spiked to their highest levels in recorded history on Monday, ambulances were screaming through the streets of Tokyo, carrying scores of people who had collapsed amid an unrelenting heat wave. A monster typhoonwas emerging from the scorching waters of the Pacific Ocean, which were several degrees warmer than normal. Thousands of vacationers fled the idyllic mountain town of Jasper, Canada ahead of a fast-moving wall of wildfire flames.
By the end of the week — which saw the four hottest days ever observed by scientists — dozens had been killed in the raging floodwaters and massive mudslides triggered by Typhoon Gaemi. Half of Jasper was reduced to ash. And about 3.6 billion people around the planet had endured temperatures that would have been exceedingly rare in a world without burning fossil fuels and other human activities, according to an analysis by scientists at the group Climate Central.
These extraordinary global temperatures marked the culmination of an unprecedented global hot streak that has stunned even researchers who spent their whole careers studying climate change.
I will admit that we’re unlikely to care if civilization ends. Because it’s very likely we’ll die in the first wave.
I know this labels me as a bad person, but I can’t really root for us anymore. We were handed dominion over paradise, but it was never enough, and even now, as the writing is on the wall, most of us lament our plight rather than the innumerable species, different but not inferior to homosapien, living in generational homeostasis that we’re going to take down with us while singing woe is us.
I reject rooting for such a vile home team, merely because it is the home team.
I take infinite solace knowing that while we will decimate surface and shallow water life, even our toolbox of horrors can’t sterilize our mother, and after she’s dealt with us, she will heal in just a couple million years, nothing to her 3.8 billion year old story of life, and paradise will be restored, until the next macro-cancer evolves at least. We weren’t even the first, though we were the first that we know of with a choice. The Carboniferous period gave way to an ice age mass extinction due to trees doing the opposite of what we’re doing, capturing too much carbon before the life that could decompose them efficiently had evolved. This is where much of our lovely coal comes from.
Wasn’t their fault. They were trees. We can do better, we know better, our brightest have been begging us for a century to heed the data, we just won’t stop.