The uninhabitable earth

THE UNINHABITABL EARTH Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak – sooner than you think.

By David Wallace-Wells

New York magazine, July 9, 2017

Athropocene and the pre-requisit of the conquest of nature by humans. Human life thrives in a very small temperature window, sensitive to change like any other species. Our relationship / interaction / coexistence with other form of life. Wet-bulb temperature. Unhabitability is around wet-bulb 35 degrees. Diseases from dehydration, kidneys failures.

Reanimation of frozen diseases, bugs, bacteria. Climate plagues. Stability of ecosystems functions as limit, global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help diseases trespass those limits. Zika as an example of disease mutation. Malaria thrives in hotter regions; every increase in temperature and the parasite reproduces 10x faster.

Unbreathable air. Perpetual War. The relationships between temperature and violence. Every half-degree increase is 10-20 percent increase armed conflict, hence U.S military obsession with climate change (well, need to check this argument). Carbon Dioxyde Parts Per Million (400ppm) increase = decline of cognitive abilities. Millions of displaced people wandering the planet.

Permanent economic collapse. “fossil capitalism” discovery of fossil fuel is the reason of economic growth, a one-time injection of new “value” in the system. A one-time injection with devastating long-term cost: climate change.

Ocean acidification and human blood acidification. The skeleton coast and hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen Sulfide versus Life.

Amitav Ghosh and the inability of humans to imagine catastrophe, disaster. (check this with old idea of human inability to imagine / figurate / infinity & death.) The dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than poisonous miasma of social fate. Natural disasters will be called weather. From seeing the future in the weather to looking at the vengeance of the past.

Time conception: “Deep Time” (early naturalist) “Dreamtime” Aboriginal Australians, of encountering in the present moment an out-of-time past, a feeling of history happening all at once.

Climate change perceive as a moral and economical debt accumulated since the industrial revolution 18th. Global warming as a solution to Femi’s paradox: Why did we not encounter other life form yet in this expanding universe, because the life’s span of civilizations are only several thousand years, several hundred for industrial one.

Peter Ward the great filter: greenhouse gas as environmental filter or the planet’s protection against us.