In The Long Heat, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton take aim at what they call rationalist-optimists — people who naively believe that market solutions can fix the climate crisis. But their sweeping critique runs the risk of abandoning all hope in the future.

Once an ice sheet begins melting or the Amazon rainforest begins dying, the process will not simply stop when emissions fall. We cannot hold blind faith that future emissions reductions or reversals can or will reverse avalanche-like changes to the natural world — and these pages are a convincing scolding of the policymakers for whom “conservatism or fatalism about society flips into extreme adventurism about nature.”

…

…despite Trumpian and Republican bluster, “a regime that embraces climate breakdown as the flipside of fossil fuels is preparing to treat it with something like sulfate planes,” especially if doing so would help reduce climate-caused migration from south to north.

In other words, a future energy secretary may well disagree with Wright that global heating is “no big deal” but agree that American oil must keep flowing and burning, and share the current administration’s xenophobia and penchant for mass deportations and illegal arrests in service of white nationalism. Such a global hegemon could dim the sun to square the circle.

  • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    8 days ago

    Reactions to fake news alarmists of the past now inform people’s reactions to legitimate climate science communication.

    One example: West Antarctic glaciers are largely laying on bedrock way below sea level. Sea temperature rise of a certain amount of time (decades) triggers a complex mechanism where those glaciers’ floating edges no longer support the the thick ice laying on bedrock under the sea level - a slow-ish, but irreversible process of melting of the whole ice sheet begins. Thus, the longer the glaciers are exposed to high sea temperatures the more likely the irreversible outcome. In my understanding, this also informs activism: Make noise early, when there are still major points to win, but once you lose hope of change, your cause seems lost to you. With the WAIS melting, last I checked (5 years ago) this can take up to 13kya or several hundred years, depending on human temperature forcing on sea temperature, ie how much we try.

    Another point: A climate win would be really anticlimactic, because it is only truly knowable beyond our lifetimes and it looks like no change.