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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/nov/21/if-i-was-feeling-hopeless-about-the-climate-what-of-the-scientists-so-i-asked-them>
"The longer you work on the climate change beat as a journalist, the less
surprised you are when the very bad things scientists warned would happen,
start to happen. Given we’re pumping carbon dioxide at record levels into the
atmosphere, where it hangs around for a century or more, there’s a relentless
inevitability to the whole thing.
It’s not so much that “shit happens” but that “physics happens”.
But this year has felt different. The physics has been kicking us up the arse –
a parade of one climate catastrophe after another. Heatwaves, floods and fires
marching in unison, trampling traumatised communities and ecosystems.
This year I’ve had scientists break down in tears during interviews after
seeing the devastation that record ocean temperatures had wreaked on coral
reefs in the Americas.
Since April, the temperature of the world’s ocean surface has been at record
highs.
In Antarctica, the amount of sea ice around the vast continent has been far
below anything seen before on the satellite record. Scientists have openly
expressed fear to me that they “might have missed something” – that global
heating is taking hold of the continent decades earlier than they thought
possible.
“The year 2023 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record” is a
sentence I could have written confidently as long ago as August. Over the last
couple of decades, we’ve been living on a planet that hasn’t been this hot for
at least 100,000 years.
Every human civilisation that ever existed has been on a planet that was cooler
than the one we’re on right now.
Sometimes, it makes filing 650 words to a deadline seem a touch inadequate
against the profoundness of the predicament we’re in.
I’ve caught myself feeling hopeless more and more often, and so a few months
ago I started to wonder. If this is how I’m feeling, what is it like for the
climate change scientists who knew what was coming decades ago? So I asked
them."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
