Chris Hedges: The Sky Really Is Falling

[marmar]

from truthdig:




The Sky Really Is Falling

Posted on May 30, 2011
By Chris Hedges


The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with equal parts of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted Pied Pipers and fools.

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’ major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which informed the Environmental Protection Agency that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism, and the possibility to develop newly accessible oil and gas reserves.” Now that’s something to look forward to.

“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously, far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,” said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still kind of the official science that the International Climate Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming, but something that is coming much more quickly and violently. Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are going to produce temperature rises so high that there is no adapting to them.” ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sky_really_is_falling_20110530/

[xchrom]

1. recommend -- is chris hedges under the bus or not? nt

[marmar]

3. Chris Hedges has permanent tire treads on his back..........

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell


Sad but true.

[xchrom]

4. he must have afflicted the comfortable one too many times. nt

[Enthusiast]

41. Yeah. I was going to say

that Hedges has never been out from under the bus.

[LARED]

2. I'm going to spend the whole day

running around in circles wildly flapping my arms and telling everyone that soon Chicago will be uninhabitable due to global warming.

This article could easily be mistaken for satire.

[carolinayellowdog]

5. got anything other than content-free snark in response?

I hope this thread does not devolve into a snarkfest

[LARED]

6. no, nt

[nxylas]

9. Guess it's not just the power elites who are in denial

Some truths are so horrible to contemplate that the desire to pretend that they "could easily mistaken for satire" is a natural one. Natural, but foolish.

[LARED]

11. And some facts are so exaggerated

it makes the truth seem satirical.

[Ship of Fools]

14. i get your point; however, & with all due respect:

have you been paying attention?

i spent the first 30 years of my life in upstate new york. NEVER in that period of time did i witness a tornado or hear about tornado warnings ... but they are happening a lot now. i've since spent the last 20+ years in kansas, and there is no such thing as just a rainy day anymore. any rain event is always accompanied by warnings, and a huge majority of the time they are dead on.

granted, this is a 50-plus-year timeframe and i'm hardly an expert, but i have spent the majority of my life barefoot and outdoors. my granddad in PA -- born in 1884 and was a rabid outdoors guy -- said that over his lifetime he witnessed a slow decline of 4-legged critters (he was a turtle soup, squirrel pie kind of guy ...)

i respond to anyone in denial (not saying that you are, but to laugh it off is exactly the response that is perpetuating the problem) to go into their garage, close all doors and windows, and turn on your car. to me, it's painfully obvious that we have created the the same condition in our atmosphere. i agree with tesha in that i don't bemoan the end of us idiots at the top of the food chain, whenever that may occur. i'm just saddened that we have to take so many other beings with us.

[femrap]

24. I'm old and

grew up on a farm. I never hear frogs croaking anymore. Used to be a nightly event. And where have the June Bugs gone?

Too many chemicals going into the land, rivers, and ponds.

When I was a kid, the pond didn't get scummy until August. Now...it's scummy on the first warm day in April. Unbelievable...guess that's why there are no frogs anymore.

Humans basically suck. But your line, "i don't bemoan the end of us idiots at the top of the food chain, whenever that may occur. i'm just saddened that we have to take so many other beings with us." sounds better.

I love animals and the people who love them.

Climate is changing....next up, food shortages. Maybe that'll get the sheeple's attention! Dumb f*cks.

[Mojorabbit]

39. We used to catch

lightning bugs and put them in jars for a few hours. It has been decades since I have seen one around here and I hear you on the frogs. I live on a lake and it used to be almost deafening but no longer.

[ejpoeta]

46. we can hear them here. and we have lightning bugs. have had kids here who have never seen them.

am always surprised to hear that. wonder if it is all the landscape lighting that does that and then I do not want to put any lighting in outside for fear it will make the fireflies go away. I remember growing up with honey bees and wonder where they are. I don't see those anymore. Do people not pay attention? I grew up in the country so maybe that's why I pay attention. People should. These things do matter. As much as they are annoying, every little insect matters. I remember one year we could go outside and were hardly getting bit from mosquitoes at 7 at night.... that was a big deal considering where we live.... in the swamps.... and usually by 5 we are a buffet if we don't have deep woods off on. that was the year it was so dry our pond went dry and most of the houses down the road's wells had gone dry and even the wildlife refuge swamp was really low.

[Pale Blue Dot]

16. Which ones, in your opinion, are exaggerated? nt

[Lorien]

18. No, they are not. nt

[appal_jack]

17. agreed. hyperbole = counterproductive.

Maybe I'm one of those dogged optimists whom Hedges derides as worse than the deniers, but I'm pretty sure that Chicago will remain 'habitable' (if not pleasant or healthy). I'm glad that smart horticulturalists are anticipating climate change and planting appropriate city trees there. It's going to take a lot of that sort of ecological design planning and implementation to blunt the sharpest edges of this anthropogenically changing climate we share.

Do I worry about climate change ravaging humanity, particularly the poorest and weakest among us? Heck yeah! Do I support shifts away from fossil fuels? Certainly! But will I echo unsupported claims such as Chicago becoming 'uninhabitable?' Um, no. There afre plenty of good reasons to take action. We don't need hyperbolic exaggerations.

-app

[truth2power]

23. Your comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion...

It's just background noise, when what's needed is serious and substantive dialog.

It puzzles me that on a supposed progressive board, where the aggregate IQ is arguably higher than what you would find on sites such as FreeRepublic, that you can't find some way to specifically refute Hedges' position if you disagree.

[LARED]

26. So you believe it's "substantive dialog"

to claim that Chicago will soon be uninhabitable due to global warming.

Or claiming that the theory that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations' is bizarre?

[truth2power]

28. You know, that is the one sentence in the whole article that I was going to pull out

and comment on. "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations".

Who said that? Oh, yeah, the Chamber of Commerce. Yes, it is bizarre, as stated. First of all, it's a blatant example of twisting language to fit one's agenda. The term "warmer" is designed to lull one into thinking it's about the average temp going from 75 to 85 degrees. No, we're talking "hot".

How hot would it have to get before crops won't grow? 110? 130? Right now the new normal here in the midwest is 100 degrees in the summer. Day after day after day. I grew up here. When I was a kid it was never this hot in the summer on an ongoing basis.

And I challenge the COC to state, in detail, the behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations they're promoting. These throw-away lines mean nothing if not accompanied by specifics as to HOW this is to be achieved. Then we'll talk.

[LARED]

33. The new norm is 100 deg F in the summer???

That is not supported by the data. If you have data to support that statement please share.

The fact that people adapt to climate changes is practically a no brainier. If people did not adapt (within limits) how do you explain people acclimatizing when the move from Maine to Florida? Or are you expecting the average temperature to be around 110 F in the near future?

BTW, my simple point was that hyperbole regarding climate change does no one any good.

[truth2power]

36. Within limits is the operative phrase. It's not about moving from Maine to Florida...

So you have the data showing the daily temperature in SW Ohio during the summer months last year? If you don't mind could you forward the link to me? I'm really interested. My data is that I lived here last summer and listened to the weather reports every day. And I don't have central a/c. Week after week it was in the high 90's to 100 or close to it. Sometimes over, counting the humidity index. Which is strange because we got no rain all summer.

All I'm saying, Lared, is that I'm seeing with my own eyes what the scientists were predicting 20-30 years ago. I've lived in this part of the country all my life. When I was a kid, I played outside during thunderstorms. Now, I don't feel safe walking across a parking lot during a storm. I read that for every 1 degree rise in the temperature of the atmosphere the incidence of lightning goes up by a certain percentage. I may not have stated that clearly, but IIRC it was in a book titled "Eaarth" (yes it's spelled that way). I'll see if I can find it in the library again and get the direct quote to you.

I don't think what Chris Hedges said constitutes hyperbole, but you can believe what you choose. I think we're in deep doo doo.

[Ship of Fools]

7. so sad

when my MIT science-guy brother passed through kansas last year, he stopped to sleep on my couch. was never very close with him until that weekend (when he finally figured out i was on the same page as he was politically).

to put it far more simply, he said: "it's going to happen so fast, we're not going to know what hit us."

anyway, he hugged me before leaving (almost a first), and he hugged me as if it was the last time we would see each other ...

now i'm haunted.

[Lorien]

19. As a kid, my best friend's dad was the director of the Polar Institute

in Antarctica and was one of the chief scientists involved in studying climate change since the mid 1960's. What he told me in the 1980s made me decide never to have children. Now all of his predictions are coming true; much, much earlier than expected.

[femrap]

25. I'm glad you and your brother

see eye to eye.

In the blink of an eye, the world can change. The Madrid Fault could heave and split the country in half at the Mississippi River.

I think food shortages will be first....the Dust Bowl made the Great Depression much worse. I saw a show on the History Channel about it. It blew my mind. I had no idea that these 'bowls' of dust were mammouth, black clouds that blew from Okla/Kansas/etc. into Washington, DC. People died from getting so much dirt in their lungs. And this happened all because of man's stupidity and thinking he could conquer Mother Nature.

Grocery stores run out of food typically in three days. To deny Climate Change is to stick one's head up one's arse.

I would try to schedule another visit with him....why not?

[dixiegrrrrl]

30. Wow...that is a powerful comment.

The smart people I know are in agreement with Hedges and are FURIOUS that we will pay such a price because of stupid lemming leadership.

[Tesha]

8. It's okay; with or without the human species, the Earth abides.

We're not the first species to drive itself to
extinction and we won't be the last. It's a
shame we'll be taking so many other species
with us, but hey!, that's the way it goes.
Unbridled population growth always has that
effect sooner or later.

The Earth will Abide.

Tesha

[Lorien]

21. Most species on earth will die off before we do

the atmosphere may also burn off. If "the earth will abide" is suppose to make it all alright, then one has to wonder why you're on a Democratic discussion board; do ANY issues matter? Because this one effects every last one of them.

[Tesha]

31. I've just gotten burned-out of the idea that humans will *EVER* do anything to inconvenience...

...themselves, even if the action is required to
save the species.

Time after time, I've been disappointed, but I'm
pretty much over that now and reconciled to the
fact that we will be our own end.

Tesha

[TransitJohn]

37. Nah, we just need to find the profit in saving ourselves.

:banghead:

[NJCher]

10. the best five words in this article

"rapid dismantling...fossil fuel industry."

Why can't this be done? It could be!

It could systematic. It could be organized. Jobs could be gained in the transition to a new source of power.

The fact is, however, that governments do not act intelligently. They have a herd mentality and are ruled by fear. Witness the Patriot Act and what they are still doing with it all these years later.

They give the oil industry tax breaks when they need to be giving tax breaks to companies who build better transit systems.

None of them seem to realize that their lack of action is the reason for Joplin, Katrina, the Gulf Oil spill, to name just a few.


Cher

[sofa king]

43. I think it's going to happen all by itself.

Aside from the discovery of one large new oil deposit underneath the Bushehr reactor in Iran (which is what the Bush Administration really wanted), there have been few major oil discoveries that have panned out since the late 1990s.

That suggests that peak oil is not only already here, but that the drop-off in production is going to be steeper than many predict, and the costs of extraction for new finds will likely be higher than many predict. Toss in the fact that many if not most oil-producing nations have been inflating their reserves for decades, and all of a sudden peak oil begins to look almost like flipping a light switch.

It further suggests that the easy half of the world's oil has already been burned off, and that nothing we do beyond this point will allow us to increase our emissions from petroleum. We've become dimly aware of the consequences once it's far past too late. Sure, we might manage to burn off every tree above the tropic lines, too, but as soon as they're gone about five billion people will have to go.

Not the "solution" I would have picked, but it seems unavoidable now.

[Frustratedlady]

12. It would be interesting to go back in the archives and find who financed

the "ridicule Gore" campaign on global warming/climate change. Granted, the Republicans led the parade, but who was putting up the big bucks. The Kochs?

[nxylas]

15. Mostly ExxonMobil

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/maps.php has more info.

[cilla4progress]

13. I know I'LL be meeting him there

(under the bus). I encountered MY share of climate change deniers, minimizers, or scoffers, here, when I drew a connection from the recent tornadoes to climate change.

[chervilant]

20. hmph.

Goldberg's column lambasting Al Gore and others who are warning us about global warming only serves to amplify the hyperbole characteristic of this burgeoning number of Chicken Littles crying that the sky is falling. We humans are a puny infestation on this amazing planet. How arrogant to presume we're going to have any lasting impact on Earth. We will simply go the way of the dinosaur -- no huge loss. The real issue is that we disrespect what we have and fail to understand that our ecosystem tends toward a balance that is beyond our control. When it is time for Earth to roll over in the grass and scrape us off her backside, we'll just have to go along for the ride.

From a letter published in the LA Times, April 23, 2006, in response to a Jonah Goldberg OP slamming Al Gore.

April, 2006... five years ago... and, we're still arguing about whether or not we can 'survive' our own hubris. Wow. What a bunch of nincowpoops. What a bunch of ultramaroons.

[femrap]

22. K and R

It's the Fossil Fuel Industry, Stupid.

[truth2power]

27. Thanks for posting, marmar. We have to just ignore

the deniers. Some really are that stupid. Others are probably paid for what they do. Either way, global climate change is happening right befor our eyes. Those of us who are older can see and compare to how it was before.

I used to see turtles on the road in the spring. I don't see them anymore. Not a one. I don't know what happened to them. I never find toads in my garden, either. I was going to make a "toad house", but what's the point? It doesn't bode well.

[salib]

29. So much for that Sheltering Sky

Bowles' hero sees the sky, bright and relentless as it is as shelter from the Abyss. Perhaps, now the humankind is defining even the sky, it is instead the anthropomorphic abyss.

Remember "if one stares into the abyss, the abyss looks back."

[dixiegrrrrl]

32. "every degree Celsius of temperature rise represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields. "

"Temperatures have gone up one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic."

How can anyone deny what is happening???

Denial is dysfunctional at this stage.

[JJW]

34. Earth will do fine without the human race

I just wish we wouldn't kill most other species in what is the destruction of life support for the greed of a few criminal and pathological persons, including the person hood of nation-less global corporations given the rights of meaningless humans by the SCOTUS.

[napoleon_in_rags]

38. That's like the third time I've heard that comment here. I makes me wonder...

...If there is some Strangelovian dimension to this whole thing. I can just see that German mad scientist holed up in the mountain with his nutritional algae and solar power, waiting to seal the vault doors with a few of his comrades only to come out in a few decades and repopulate the planet.

The extermination of the human race is unlikely precisely because of weirdos, the outliers. Somebody will survive. Its that willingness to accept that nobody will so we may as well give up that I question.

[Tesha]

44. I actually wondered about bringing that up.

In general, your theory is correct: in any species, there are
always "outliers", genetic, geographical, or both.

But in the case of humans, an awful lot of the outliers are
located in places that won't survive the catastrophe; they'll
either be underwater or baked to a crisp in parching drought
conditions. It may only be those Strangelovian folks down in
the nuclear-powered mine shafts that survive.

The real question, to me, is how bad the wars will be when
the excrement starts hitting the ventilator. I actually don't doubt
that there will remain some places in this earth where humans
could survive the coming changes, but remember, we still have
nuclear weapons and there are still people ready to use them.
In the end, *THAT* might be the factor that tips us into extinction.

Tesha

[MasonJar]

35. I used to worry for my grandson. After the report of this being the worst

year for pollution damage to the environment on record and after the devastating storms for many continuous months, I now worry for not only my grandson, but also my children and even myself. Our politicians are useless. They are owned by the very corporations we need to regulate. They will go down with us, but I'd prefer for those two guilty parties to go down alone.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

40. When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, the normal winter

for Minneapolis-St. Paul included three weeks to a month when it never went above zero and two or three blizzards.

This was still true when I came back from grad school and lived here for three years in the early 1980s.

After 19 years in Oregon, I came back in 2003 (after an unusually hot Oregon summer), steeling myself for more subzero temperatures and blizzards. I bought two pairs of snow boots.

I didn't use the snow boots for three years. One year, it was 50°F on December 18--something unimaginable in my childhood, when significant snow by Thanksgiving was the norm. This past winter was the first one in which it was even close to normal, and even then, we had only one significant blizzard of the type that we would have thought of as a real blizzard in the 1960s. Most Twin Cities schoolchildren had their first "snow day" this year.

Of course, the right-wingers immediately started gloating about how "Al Gore was wrong."

I'm not a gardener, but I'm told that the Twin Cities have been "promoted" to a warmer gardening belt.

The climate is doing exactly what the computer models predicted: weird weather everywhere, extremes of drought and rainfall, more severe storms, some regions growing hotter, some regions growing colder (e.g. western Europe).

[tinwi]

42. What Chicago is doing makes sense

At least they are not trying to pretend the problem does not exist. What are the oil barons going to do, relocate to another planet?
I wonder, if while trying to reduce greenhouse gases we can harvest some of the fresh water that is melting polar ice. We are going to have a water problem. And if we can try to save some coastal cities with levees, canals, redirecting the water somehow? It does not seem enough people are taking this too seriously.

[blackspade]

45. More great reporting by Hedges.

The nihilists are in charge these days.

[Name removed]

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