HIGHLIGHTS
1. We have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already.
2. How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive?
3. Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer.
4. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide.
5. One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you.
My dear, dear reader.
Let us discuss the contemporary human predicament, and for now, let us just focus on climate. Moreover, I just want to focus on the 1.5 degree warming limit aimed for by the so-called Paris Agreement. (There was an agreement. It was in Paris. But that is all you need to know. It was useless in curbing the climate catastrophe to any significant degree.)
Some responsible scientists note that we have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already, now, in 2026. For example Tad Patzek, Kevin Anderson, Bill McGuire and James Hansen. The conservative consensus of the politically-driven IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of the United Nations, has proclaimed that 1.5 degrees can only be declared after it has been averaged over 20 years. However, since man-made climate change is probably accelerating (research the scientists above), by the time the 1.5 degree average is declared by the IPCC, global warming will have reached nearer 2 degrees, year on year. And by the time 2 degrees of average global warming is declared, it will actually be nearer 3 degrees, and so on. Do not be lulled into a deathly sleep by the IPCC and the self-serving politicians served by them.
How old will you be in 20 years? It would be prudent to imagine the likely 2 degrees of warming in 2045 and its potential impacts on your life, and it would be prudent to start to prepare now for those impacts, for they will not be slight. Averages of global warming are primarily given for the planet as a whole, but warming over land (where humans live) is always higher than the land-ocean average. A conservative estimate is that 2 degrees of global warming translates to at least 3 degrees of warming over land. Moreover, this warming is not evenly distributed, even over land. Both Europe (where I am from) and Canada (where I live) are warming twice as fast as the global average. So, if you live in these places, (and some select other places) imagine an average of 6 degrees of warming over land, in 2045 (a very reasonable scenario, all things considered). But it gets worse. The bell curve of statistically probable temperatures is shifting towards the hotter end of the spectrum as a whole: this means that rare heat extremes which, for example, due to the current Super El Niño, in Europe are now spiking to around 40 degrees, from an average June high of around 30 degrees, will be several degrees hotter than today. Moreover, as baseline global warming increases, scientists are observing that temperature spikes are increasingly exponentially. So the famous temperature spike of 25 degrees-above-average in Lytton, British Columbia, during the North American heat dome of June 2021, taking the temperature to 49 degrees, if mirrored in 2045 (from a baseline average of 30, instead of 24) could result in an exponentially bigger spike of, for example, 30 degrees, resulting in a 60 degree temperature event. This is not unreasonable conjecture, but is within the likely range of scenarios. Even 55 degrees would be catastrophic enough, I am sure you agree.
How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive? Maybe you would if it happened now, but how about when you are twenty years older? And what about your children?
No amount of reasoning can help us now. All I can appeal to, is your greed, and your fear (my greed, my fear) and Heaven help us, our sense of poetry. Centre of the Web is a global platform, but since its readers are so far mostly from so-called developed countries, I aim this post mainly at you.
You will crave after those fond memories of swims in lakes with your family, followed by ice-creams and board games. You will feel compelled to swim in lakes in all seasons, to somehow make yourself tough enough (though you will not really understand why you are doing this), and the board games you play will tend towards the kind that attempt to teach survival skills.
You will, pathetically, be more and more proud of the less and less valuable things you own, and become impressively more strategic in how you plan to sell them. Many of your cutting edge gadgets will cease to function in 50 degrees of heat, as will your shares in the companies that produce such gadgets.
Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer. You must understand, times will become desperate; it is for the sake of your children.
Your liberal-left attitudes towards immigration will harden into hard right attitudes, as the Global South capitalizes on the acclerated warming in the North, engaging in long, drawn-out economic hit-and-runs. Unconsciously, you will sympathize with the raiders. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide (and for some, to the point of suicide).
Even when things become hellish, you will attempt to continue with your daily routine, as if nothing extraordinary is happening. You will keep going to the gym despite the extravagent expense and its drain on electricity, and the smashing of gym equipment by local activists. Only the neonazis taking over will finally convince you to renounce your membership. You will only be mildly surprised when your clubcard membership to various other outlets suddenly becomes null and void, on account of the mass bankruptcy of those outlets, due to heat-induced supply chain failures.
Finally, you will be upset, very upset, when your favourite butterfly suddenly goes extinct, in the space of a single season. At this, and only this, you will cry your eyes out….One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you, to grab onto. You will unearth only an odd piece of plastic, and you will stare at it for an eternity, expressing perfectly how powerless and divorced from nature you feel…
Of course, if you somehow manage to change direction in your life, in an extraordinary way, before all of this unfolds, and if enough other people do the same, a small percentage of these kinds of outcomes may be partly avoidable or subvertable into a less dark kind of poetics, as represented in your thoughts, the stories you tell to yourself and your friends, the posts you post on decrepit social media platforms, and so on. I wish this for you, more than anything in the world. I really, really do.
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My name is Matthew Azuley, and I am the founding editor of Centre of the Web. I am also the editor of the globally diverse anthology Climate Collapse? Calls to Action from Around the World, published by Arkbound in the UK.
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