This post isn’t about the various weather-related disasters unfolding across the globe these Anthropocene days. This post is about the actual globe itself. So get this:
From https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-is-making-days-longer-scientists-discover-13178556
Rising sea levels caused by climate change are making the Earth "fatter" at the equator - slowing down its rotation and making the days longer.
As polar ice caps have melted, water has shifted from the poles to the equator, "significantly" increasing how oblate - or fat - the Earth is since 1900, and lengthening its days.
Adding a few milliseconds to a 24-hour day may not sound much, but it has "implications for precise timekeeping and space navigation", the authors of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said.
The pace of change is higher than at any point in the 20th century, they found.
MIND. FUCKING. BLOWN.
Getting across how TOTAL and all-encompassing are the effects of a changing climate is pretty much Job One of climate communications - but it’s also one of the hardest tasks.
Most folks, let’s be honest, still aren’t really tuned in. And for the average person who thinks there are other more pressing fish to fry, looking at or thinking about climate change is a bit analogous to them holding up a cardboard tube to peer through, and then judging the fraction that they see of the entire world to be all that there is of it.
In other words, for most people, climate change is a little bit of this or a little bit of that - hotter summers, or more rain in far off places - and not much more. Weather events seem episodic and one-off, so most folks look at each episode as a standalone event (even if tragic and/or horrifying) which means that they are not grouping these phenomena into trends.
Even the media presentation of wildfires and hurricanes and flash floods encourages this kind of thinking, whereby we are given to understand that every individual hurricane or flash flood or heat wave is as a terrifying but very isolated singularity, not something that is part of the totality of a changing climate. It is very easy to NOT connect the dots and see that all of this is related.
I struggle - many of us struggle - to convey the MUCHNESS and WHOLE GODDAMNED THING-NESS of the climate crisis.
And in order to have done our jobs properly as writers about what is going on - the utter horror show of our current predicament - we must grab people by the metaphorical throat and snap them to attention so they will refocus their gaze on climate change as not just one discrete thing among many that they can care about, but as the planet altering phenomenon that it is.
I’ve said this before (in my small, small voice): the climate isn’t something “over there” that you can regard dispassionately. The climate is WHERE YOU ARE NOW.
Everything happening now, everything that has happened in the past in human history and beyond, and everything that will happen in the future on this planet takes place inside the climate. Within the climate.
The climate is not something from which you can stand back. You cannot observe the climate from a distance. You are in the climate now, and you will always be in the climate. Even after you are dead and buried, your earthly remains will be inside the ecosystem that is inside the climate. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE.
Or, perhaps you can? Perhaps you can build a ship to fly to the moon and live inside a lunar cave. Perhaps, like Elon Musk, you can delude yourself into thinking that Mars can be made habitable in the near term, and you (and your uber wealthy cronies and besties) can “fly away home” to a new planet, where we humans have not (yet) utterly wrecked everything.
But no. For most of us (realistically, for all of us) we are stuck here on Earth, in a climate that is changing so rapidly that it has sober-sided scientists absolutely stunned.
It’s that difficulty in getting across the hugeness of the crisis that drew me to the story quoted above. It’s not about a heatwave far away where (let’s face it, mostly far away and brown) people are dying. It’s not about wildfire season that can be waved away with “this is typical of Northern California, come ON, libtards!” It is about the WHOLE DAMNED PLANET (or at least the oceans, which cover 70% of its surface) being affected by the changing climate - which, in turn, was affected by the grotesquely selfish and evil actions of a handful of (mostly) men in the fossil fuel industry who have spent the last half century lying and gaslighting and funding contrarian “science” to keep the blinders on the populace so that they can go on making money.
Making money. A few rich fucks wanting to pad their already obscene bank balances. That’s what did it.
Sure, population growth, too many people, eating too much meat, rising living standards, blah blah blah. BUT AT BOTTOM, this horrorshow we’re heading into is the result of avarice. Blind, grasping avarice, by a very few wealthy individuals who did not care a fig for the untold thousands upon millions of people who will suffer grievously and die because of their heedless actions.
They knew. They were told. There are no excuses. We need a climate revolution to bring them to justice.
Remember:
- Asking did not work.
- Voting did not work.
- Marching did not work.
- Emissions keep going up.
#ClimateRevolution