The Great Pause Week 35: Why Climate Solutions Will Fail… or Not

"70 million USAnians voted for Krusty the maniacal clown instead of Mr. Rogers. Is it that we genetically crave that kind of entertainment?"

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Image after Victoria Van, Tiger Times student newspaper in Texarkana

Last week I took a look at the McPherson Paradox and explained why it failed the real-world test of the Covid Pandemic. Some may believe that my conclusion was that McPherson’s general theory of near term human extinction (NTHE) was discredited, so I want to take time this week to explain why that is not the case.

While McPherson’s conclusions about the clathrate gun and global dimming are reasonably to be called into question, I believe his conclusions about the social dimension of the problem are fundamentally sound and support his overall NTHE thesis, if not his timeline.

The ongoing rate of temperature rise indicates that the climate of Earth will resemble that of the Pliocene Epoch as early as 2030, even ignoring the aerosol masking effect and many self-reinforcing feedback loops. The mid-Pliocene was more than 2 °C warmer than contemporary Earth. The rate of change foreseen by Burke et al. is occurring rapidly enough to assure the inability of vertebrates and mammals to adapt, thus leading to extinction of humans and most other life on Earth well before 2030. I am not suggesting there will be humans on Earth in 2030. Rather, it seems unlikely there will be any life on Earth at, or shortly after, that time.

— Prof. Guy McPherson, Environ Anal Eco Stud. 7(2). DOI: 10.31031/EAES.2020.07.000656

The reason I believe this has much to do with our recent election in the United States, where some 70 million USAnians voted, without coersion or duress, to return President Cobblepot and his Gotham crime family to the White House. Fortunately for the planet, he needed more than 75 million votes to best his opponent and did not get that last 5 million. It also has to do with the response to the Covid Pandemic that we see acted out in the streets of many countries. 

I posted something to Facebook last week about how N95 masks work to electrostaticly trap virus particles and received an angry screed from a dear friend in Bolivia. The screed elicited many more comments and from that colloquy it is possible to illustrate why I think the response to the pandemic is but a foreshadow of our NTHE trajectory.

My friend wrote:

I do not believe that there is a pandemic, but a scamdemic that is incarcerating healthy people in their homes, making them sick, poor, and eager to commit suicide. I believe that governments are complicit and that they are taking peoples’ rights and freedoms in the name of this plandemic and through the everyday spreading of fear among the population. If you read what they are doing in Spain, following the EU, they will control the spread of any article or news talking against C19. 

… it is all a big f….* hoax. The base for their numbers is mainly the PCR test, which can only show traces of RNA of any of the 7 coronaviruses we know, 4 of them being the common flu. This is the trigger for a complete takeover and the start of the Great Reset and The World Economic Forum’s agenda.

Another friend in Thailand wrote to tell me he was providing me “factual data, expert opinion and comprehensive analysis.” He then gave a summary of thirty facts that “strongly contradict the official narrative and raises serious questions about the need for, and effectiveness of such drastic reactions as those that have been imposed by most governments around the world.”

I will be the first to acknowledge that the forced limitation of face-to-face contact has caused tens of millions to become involuntarily unemployed, along with the closure of many markets and devastation of many industries, especially in the independent small business sector. Retail merchandising, travel, hospitality, entertainment, restaurants, bars, gyms, and personal services (hair salons, massage) have been especially hard hit. A huge proportion of small enterprise is closing and will never be able to reopen. Remaining retail sectors are increasingly going online and virtual platform businesses and networks are thriving — companies like Google, Amazon, E-bay, PayPal, Facebook, Apple, and Uber.

Race, ethnicity, social status and caste play a huge role in whom among us can work from home or behind a plexiglass shield. Many protective measures exempt those who work as janitors, maids, meat-packers, prison guards, or checkout counter clerks. We don’t very carefully protect Uber drivers, Amazon packing line workers, or postal clerks and letter carriers. Your risk of dying from Covid depends not only on what your job is, but whether it carries health benefits, is indoors, and involves large amounts of random personal contact. We have known since the Plague of Justinian that those who can afford to flee to a private villa and just wait it out with their servants have a better chance of survival. Some things never change.

I think the two communications from my friends fairly summarize the disconnect many people feel with national and international attempts to bring the pandemic to heel. Many see it as merely the latest example of governments’ intrusive overreach towards some unobtainable security goal. These friends don’t trust the vaccination program for the same reason they don’t trust government assurances of peace through war or energy security through atomic power — too many lies.

So let us imagine the new US administration sets up a White House Office on Climate Change. Asked to make recommendations, the science is clear but the politics is a third rail. Science tells them to even have a 50–50 chance of bringing Earth back to the safe habitable zone in time to avert human extinction, CO2 emissions need to be reduced by 11% per year — halved every decade. From a starting point now of 40 GtCO2/y (global emissions of 40 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide and its equivalents of other trace greenhouse gases), we need to get to 20 by 2030, 10 by 2040, 0 by 2050. Then, because we waited too long to start the process, we need to withdraw legacy carbon at the same rate as growth, inverted — minus 10 by 2060, minus 20 by 2070, minus 30 by 2080 and so on, until we stabilize at a pre-industrial concentration, successfully withdrawing approximately 1.5 trillion tons from the atmosphere.

If my friends — and the many citizens of like mind in many countries — chafe under the heavy hand of their government in mandating masks, travel restrictions, home quarantines and vaccination, what might we imagine would be their response to halving their use of transportation, electrical appliances, land, and more — every decade? Imagine half the number of energy draining server farms by 2030, and half that again by 2040. Imagine half the semesters abroad programs, half the trips to the mall, half the cargo ships carrying goods from China, and then halve that again, and again.

I think it is reasonable to conclude, as both McPherson and I do, that people won’t cooperate. They’ll toss out the tight-fisted, socialist scoundrels and elect people who promise to return 20th-century greatness again. And so our grandchildren shall all perish from the heat and the storms. And so will many, or even most, other life forms on Earth.

I could leave this essay to end here, but I won’t. There is still a way out. It is only a faint glimmer of hope, a flicker of light, but it is there. We could change our minds, roll up our sleeves, and work this out together.

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