Three Facts Everyone Should Know About the Age of Extinction
See those two pics above? That’s what’s known as the “world heat map.” One’s from 1976, which was a hot year, back in…those days. The other one’s now. I don’t have to explain which is which. You already know.
You know because Europe’s on fire. France, Portugal, Spain, Greece — a ring of flames is sweeping through it. London’s hotter than parts of the Sahara. In France, they’re calling it a “heat apocalypse.” And that’s just the beginning. “Wildfires raged at the weekend across Europe and north America. In south America, the Macchu Picchu archaeological site was threatened by fire. Extreme heat has broken records around the world in recent months, as heatwaves have struck India and south Asia, droughts have devastated parts of Africa, and unprecedented heatwaves at both poles simultaneously astonished scientists in March.”
What does the world heat map tell you? Here’s what it tells me. This isn’t just “climate change” anymore. It’s climate suicide.
Don’t take it from me, though. Take it from the Secretary General of the UN. He said, today, that humanity is committing “collective suicide.” Antonio Guterres has emerged as probably the only leader in the world who’s willing to tell it like it is. Because there’s no better or more accurate way to describe our plight right now than that: suicide.
It’s not “climate change” — and it never should have been. That term was invented by a Republican lobbyist — the kind who help install demagogues around the world, from Trump onwards — to deliberately make it seem non-threatening. It was tested in focus groups and approved. It’s propaganda. It’s a Big Lie. Our climate isn’t “changing.” It’s transforming, suddenly, so much so that you can now feel it, every single seasons, month, week. It is altering in the blink of an eye, in frightening ways.
We are now experiencing the beginnings of something genuinely unprecedented in human history: Extinction. We are a species who has created the first endogenous — self-made — mass extinction in all of deep history. It’s in that sense — that very real sense — that we’re committing suicide. Extinction includes us. We’re committing suicide by way of extinction.
Let me apply the usual caveats, before every hare-brained pundit froths at the mouth. Extinction doesn’t mean “everything dies.” It doesn’t even mean “we all die.” It means what it says. It means extinction. The last extinction, the Permian? 90% of species died off. That’s what we’re facing. A cataclysm of that scale. Something human beings have never, ever experienced before. It’s never been this hot in London. Not in human history. Think about that for a second.
But do we get it? The way that most people think about this topic has been shaped and framed by the propaganda of “climate change.” Sounds…pretty innocuous…even reversible. So most people appear to have a mental model of what we’re facing that goes like this: if we cut carbon emissions, stop doing the bad stuff, then hey presto — things will go back to normal!!
Right? Right?
Wrong.
Things will never go back to normal. The planet that we grew up on — that every single generation of human beings did before us — is already gone.
Even if we were to stop pumping toxic junk into the sky tomorrow, this would be the future.
The temperature wouldn’t magically go back down. The megafires and megafloods wouldn’t — abracadabra! — go away. The heatwaves wouldn’t stop. This is our planet now. Even if we stopped emitting carbon, full stop, totally, tomorrow, in some kind of radical collective decision to make one last ditch effort to save ourselves, the planet would still keep on heating up. That’s because there’s an “overhang” effect from the carbon we’ve already emitted. Just like, I don’t know, when you press stop on a kettle, but the water keeps boiling for a while.
This is our planet now.
The first thing that you have to understand, therefore, is this. Things are never going back to normal. Not in our lifetimes, anyways. Maybe someone will invent some magic machine to vacuum the carbon from the skies — some are trying. But it’s a longshot, and in the absence of that long shot, people need to really, really grasp the most basic fact of all about what we face: all this? No, it doesn’t magically reverse itself, even if we start doing the right things.
What we have is the power to stop it. Somewhere in the range of right about here. And somewhere in the range of right about here is already, well, really, really, bad.
Why? Not just because London’s broiling, and Europe’s on fire, and the poles are melting, and so on. But because of the wreckage all this is already inflicting on our lives.
You imagine, I suppose, like many people do, that you can just sit in air-conditioned comfort and ride out the Age of Extinction. Wrong. Even if we arrest this process of suicide right now, what kind of economies, societies, polities do we have? Harvests are failing. Hence, inflation’s spiking. Pandemics are coming hard and fast now, first Covid, now Monkeypox, then who knows what. People are growing poorer, fast, as inflation bites, even in rich countries. That destabilizes societies, because an ugly truth of our global economy is that most people still live paycheck to paycheck, even in places like America and Europe. As middle and working classes die off as social groups, and a dystopian underclass emerges, an atavistic impulse races through societies. Trust in institutions collapses. Rage and fury and despair are all that are left. Democracy dies, and in its place rises every kind of lunacy — from American style theocracy to British style nationalism to Europe’s resurgent far right to Putin’s resource wars.
This is the world we live in now. Even if we arrest the process of Extinction right now, we still live on this planet. It’s one whose ecology has been dramatically altered. As things stand, right now, our basic systems are failing — water, food, energy, medicine, money, and inflation just reflects that grim reality. None of that magically goes away and reverses itself any more than “climate change” does. Even if we stop boiling the planet alive tomorrow, we still live on a planet of inflation, extremism, shortages, wars breaking out, desperate masses turning to lunacy for salvation, billionaires profiteering off it all, systems failing, ecologies dying…Extinction.
What’s my message, then? Give up? Throw your hands up in despair? Slit your wrists? No, man, what are you, the New York Times? Grow up! Let’s talk like adults, not idiots and pundits.
It’s that what we’re doing — even at our most ambitious — isn’t nearly enough. It’s so little, so late, that analogies fail. Imagine that your house is burning down, and you grab the world’s smallest water pistol, and shoot it…once. Or imagine that you have a terrible, life-threatening infection, and instead of taking some antibiotics, you decide to rage at…wokeness. This is where we are as a world, as a civilization.
We are in incredibly, incredibly deep trouble. Let’s sum up the situation. The planet is now heating up faster than at any point in its history, so far as we know. So fast, that you can literally feel it every summer. It’s not some kind of abstraction anymore. So what are we doing? Nothing. That is why Guterres says we’re committing collective suicide.
Do you have any idea how the world is trying to combat “climate change”? No, you don’t — most people don’t, anyways. That’s a damning indictment of our media and education systems both. So let me teach you, quickly. The world’s nations meet at a thing called COP, the United Nations Climate Change Conference. They make deals to…try and do something. What’s happened so far?
“At COP26, countries agreed to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but the commitments they made were still inadequate to do so. All countries agreed to come forward this year with improved national plans for greenhouse gas emissions, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
“Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, who leads the EU bloc at the UN climate talks, dampened expectations for the conference in an interview with Guardian. ‘I don’t see that many new NDCs on the horizon, frankly,’ he said, pointing to Australia, with its new government, as a rare exception.”
Get that? Nations pledge to cut emissions, according to a system called “nationally determined contributions.” There are three huge problems with all this. One, nobody much takes the pledges seriously, apart from maybe Europe. Two, the pledges have loopholes, like “net zero,” which isn’t “real zero,” meaning that you can emit carbon, and then promise to…do something nice in a while to “offset it,” but meanwhile, the planet keeps on burning. And three, all of this is breaking down into a blame game between poor and rich countries.
The system isn’t working. That’s not “my opinion.” That’s reality. It’s why — here’s the scariest fact of all — carbon emissions just keep on rising. They paused briefly in 2020, falling for the first time in history — and leaders cheered. But that was due to the pandemic — because in 2021, they rose all over again, and hit their highest point in history.
Let me say that again, because this is the second thing everyone should know.
The first one, remember, was that even if we magically stop emitting carbon today, no, we don’t get the planet we grew up on back. We live on this planet now.
Fact two: carbon emissions hit their highest ever level in 2021. Highest ever.
Now connect some of those dots. Here we have a planet that’s transforming, suddenly, in incredibly frightening ways. Europe on fire, London hotter than the Sahara, the American West about to run out of water, the Indian Subcontinent hitting 50 degrees Celsius, animals fleeing to the poles.
And we’re not doing anything about it.
I know that you probably think we’re doing something about it. This is the impression you end up with if you read the New York Times and the rest of the dummies list. Hey! Everything will be fine! Oooh, which celebrity got married where?
But the facts — and they are hard facts — is that we are not doing anything about the death of our planet, by way of Extinction. “Doing something” presumably means having an effect, right? But all our efforts so far amount to nought. Emissions are still rising.
We may be “trying” in some vague, numinous sense, but we are not accomplishing anything so far. Say you wanted your kid to…I don’t know…mow the lawn. And every day, he whined, “Dad, I’m tryingggggg!!” After a while, you’d probably sit the little guy down, and explain that trying if you don’t actually do anything isn’t good enough. If I took this approach with the washing up — “Sweetie, I’m tryinnggg!!!” — my friends? I’d be divorced.
You get my drift.
That leads me to my third brutal fact. Fact one, no, we’re not magically going back to the temperate planet of a few decades ago, even if we stop doing the bad stuff now. We only, slowly, begin to stop making it that much worse — the mega fires, flood, melts, inflation, cratering economies, broken societies, fanaticism, all of it linked through the malign hand of collapse. Fact two, we’re not doing anything so far — just talking about doing something, really — because emissions just go right on rising.
Fact three: our planet is going to continue to heat up in shocking and disturbing ways. It’s already happening much, much faster than it should have. Scientists are shocked by how fast and suddenly it’s happening. Even they didn’t expect the poles to melt this fast, or Europe to be on fire. Or London to hit north of 40 degrees Celsius..by 2022. It’s happening way, way faster than our most dire predictions.
And at some point, some point soon, we are going to begin to hit tipping points. What are those? The ocean currents slow. The great northern and equatorial forests die off. The ice sheets disintegrate — for good. Permafrost melts away.
Those are just climatic ones. There are ones related to species we don’t know about. What happens if the insects die off? The bees? The fish? What happens to oceans, rivers, forests, agriculture, then — suddenly, as entire towers of life implode from the bottom?
Let me now restate fact three, because we’re in a position, at last, to finally talk about it realistically.
Fact one: it’s not magically going away, any of it. Even if we stop abusing it tomorrow, there’s no going back. Fact two: we’re not anywhere close to stopping tomorrow. The systems we have are all bark and no bite, and so every year or two, the world goes through the motions of pretending to “fight climate change,” while in actuality, nothing changes.
Fact three. This is Extinction. The other day, I put it like this: we’re sleepwalking into it. I think that Antonio Guterres put it in an even better way. This is a form of collective suicide.
This isn’t just climate change anymore. This is climate suicide. We live on this planet, too. Our civilization, though you might think it’s grander than Rome, is incredibly fragile. Harvests drop by a small amount — bang! Prices spike. Animals flee to the poles — wham, pandemics erupt. Middle and working classes cheated of the false promise of perpetual growth turn to fascism, theocracy, authoritarianism, as life becomes a struggle just to survive.
We need to act, my friends.
This is the planet we live on now. Like it? Then we had better change. Because right about now, we are a species and civilization committing suicide. Suicide by way of extinction. We are burning our own house down, and sitting in the basement watching Marvel Movies, posting Instagram videos laughing at the creeping flames. But it’s getting a little unfunny now. Get up, idiot, get up. Put out the flames. Your house? It’s already gone. But maybe we have a chance, still, to build anew from the ashes.
Umair
July 2022
