Ultra Doomers, Assemble!
Climate change is so bad, conventional dooming just isn’t enough
I’ve noticed a new trend in climate change dooming lately, and I’m ready to join up. The most hardcore doomers no longer say humanity will be mostly gone by 2100. Now we are saying, “Abandon hope, all ye here! Absolutely no life will be left on this planet in 20 years!”
We are the Ultra Doomers!
(Or did Medium writer Michael Campi beat me to the punch with the term apocalerati?)
It could well be 10 years, by the way, or by the year 2030, though I’m afraid to go there yet.
Besides Medium author Alan Urban’s terrifying weekly (now monthly) Collapse Catch-Ups, two recent data points have tipped me over the edge. The first one is this chart of North Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures suddenly jumping off the chart:
Extrapolate that out a couple of years, and Yikes! Whether you extend out the current frightening rise or just do a least-squares fitting of the year so far, it shows doom on the way. That’s about 1.25dC rise per year on the least-squares fit line, and about 10dC by the end of this year on the steep line.
The second persuasive point I found recently is this report Will humans be extinct by 2026? from the Arctic News. It shows that a couple of big methane burps released from the melting arctic permafrost and we can be off to the races to a greater-than 30dF temperature rise fast.:
Another huge red flag is that James Hansen has begun advocating for risky geo-engineering (now dubbed Solar Radiation Management or SRM). From the pre-print paper Global warming in the pipeline (bold highlight is mine, and I removed footnote references):
A promising — and probably necessary — approach to overcome humanity’s harmful geo-transformation of Earth is temporary solar radiation management (SRM). Risks of such intervention must be defined, as well as risks of no intervention; thus, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommends research on SRM. An example of SRM is injection of atmospheric aerosols at high southern latitudes, which global simulations suggest would cool the Southern Ocean at depth and limit melting of Antarctic ice shelves. The most innocuous aerosols may be fine salty droplets extracted from the ocean and sprayed into the air by autonomous sailboats. This approach has been discussed for potential use on a global scale, but even use limited to Southern Hemisphere high latitudes requires research and forethought to avoid unintended adverse effects. The present decade is probably our last chance to develop the knowledge, technical capability, and political will for the actions needed to save global coastal regions from long-term inundation.
These various indications are not proof positive that ultra-doom is here. But if you read the tea-leaves, they are telling us: Ultra-Doom Is Here. I have never been among the first to recognize what is happening with climate change, but even I can read these tea leaves.
I am an Ultra-Doomer, a card-carrying member of the apocalerati. Will you join us?
— Lannie Rose, July 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but only as a thesaurus for writing
