Climate Emergency
- Breakfast: Coffee, oatmeal with an apple or berries, malt-o-meal with peanut butter
- Lunch in the winter: Vegetable soup
- Lunch in the summer: Enchiladas or hummus and pita
- Dinner or snacks in late afternoon: Malt-o-meal with peanut butter, popcorn, pumpkin-butter oatmeal balls, pumpkin-butter on toast, pumpkin-butter on graham crackers (yes, I like pumpkin butter), oatmeal with an apple or berries.
Hothouse Earth
Yeah, yeah. I know, another post about climate emergency. But this came across my RSS today and I have no choice but to post.
‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.
“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
It’s too rare that we see the hard, dark truth. As I understand it climate communicators have tried to leave a space for people to feel hopeful so that they would take action. In some ways, it makes sense. To do otherwise raises the possibility that in feeling hopeless people would just give up. Unfortunately the result seems to be that in leaving a space for hope we’ve also left a space to procrastinate. For too long we have come to think that the problem is further down the road, a problem for the future.
Turns out, no, it’s a problem for right now. There is no more kicking this can down the road. The truth is, this was a problem we should have begun dealing with 20 years ago. And now it’s likely too late to do much at all. Of course we should act immediately and decisively with radical, deep cuts. That’s what’s required because we waited too long. But, for the most part, we’re not going to act and the actions we do take will be too little. So, we’ve elected to let the planet and our future burn.
A tragedy that’s been many decades in the making and one that could have been avoided. But we chose not to deal with it and are still choosing not to deal with it.
Fantastic, easy to understad data visualization showing monthly global temperatures between 1880 and 2021. NASA: GISTEMP Climate Spiral Visualization
A personal encounter with climate change from Adam Horowitz, Dispatch: The Day the River Went Dry:
I lament that this day has come, and am moved to ask what’s possible when we bear witness together: how might we become more immense in our capacity to feel, and more courageous and creative in our response?
Watching this interview with a young Ugandan Activist Vanessa Nakate and thinking about the incredibly unfair use of resources and the dumping of waste by the wealthiest onto the poorest. m.youtube.com/watch
DIY Climate Adaption: Diet
So, it’s 2022 and the US continues its utter and complete failure to meaningfully deal with the climate crisis. At all levels. The government is failing at so many things, most importantly, the climate crisis. But we, the people, we are also failing because we insist on living high-carbon lives. We refuse to walk or bike away from cars, trucks, and SUVS. We insist the highest level of comfort in our homes, cooled to 72 in the summer, heated to 76 in the winter. We must have the latest, best and most consumer goods. We deserve that flight across country for a vacation.
In short, we behave badly and wait for a broken government to force us to behave in the way we must. I’ve heard the argument that only government can fix the problem with mass, large scale programs. I get that such programs can and do help and are needed. But we as individuals make choices everyday and if 332 million US citizens insist on making selfish choices it adds up to a lot of carbon in the atmosphere. Everyday we insist on the maximum comfort and convenience we can afford.
I’ve written before about the steps I take in my daily life to try to adapt, to explore and express and act on my concern in the way that I can. I’ll continue to do this because I think it’s the most important aspect of life in 2022. A few weeks back I wrote about cutting plastic out of my life as much as possible.
Another adaption I’ve made is food choice. I’ve been vegetarian for 28 of the past 30 years. I do sometimes eat fish out of a nearby lake. For a brief period I also ate locally raised pork and beef as well as venison from deer hunted locally. With the exception of fish a couple times a year I’ve cut all of the rest back out of my diet and have gone to a nearly vegan diet. The only exception is ice cream and on rare occasions, cheese. My diet is fairly healthy but is very simple and cheap. Don’t let anyone tell you a healthy diet is expensive. Anyone could do this diet or a variation and save money, and reduce carbon. This is the diet I’m personally happy with.
Most days it’s this:
Drinks: water, tea, coffee, hot chocolate
The above diet is packaged in paper, cardboard or steel cans with limited to no plastic so, recyclable or compostable. It’s a healthy diet with lots of fiber, adequate protein, not too much sugar, and a good balance of vitamins.
My shopping list, all available at any standard grocery store:
Breakfast: Oatmeal purchased in large paperboard box tubes (Much cheaper than boxes with serving size envelops of that also usually have lots of extra sugar), apples, cinnamon (purchased in bulk), brown sugar, soy milk (paper carton), coffee
Lunch, enchiladas: Refried beans in a steel can, enchilada sauce in a steel can, corn tortillas in a plastic bag, nutritional yeast ordered in bulk, plastic bag.
Lunch, soup: Crushed tomatoes in a steel can, beans from steel can, frozen mixed vegetables from a plastic bag, pasta from a paperboard box, spices, salt, nutritional yeast.
Snacks or dinner: Plain popcorn kernels sold in plastic bag, vegetable oil in spray can (quick spray onto popcorn after popping to help flavoring spice to stick), nutritional yeast, garlic, salt.
Pumkin butter: Easy to make using canned pumpkin (1/4 cup), peanut butter (2 tablespoons), cinnamon, brown sugar (2 teaspoons) and salt. I mix that up and put it on toast or graham crackers)
Pumpkin butter oatmeal balls: 1 cup of oatmeal. I blend half of it into flour then mix it up with the above serving of pumpkin butter and roll it into balls. No baking needed and ready in minutes.
Any peanut butter will work in the above. I used to buy whatever “natural” variety available at the store that was cheapest and in glass. Lately I’ve been buying big bags of peanuts and I blend them into peanut butter. Takes more time but it’s cheaper and I’m reusing all the glass jars I saved from buying the store bought peanut butter. And really, the peanut butter I make is better. I’ll do a separate post on a few tips when making peanut butter.
Tea is herbal from a box or mint that I’ve grown. Hot chocolate is straight baking cocoa in a paperboard container… just add sugar and soy milk.
With a fairly standardized diet I generally shop just once every 5 weeks. I tend to buy most of the same stuff and know what I need for that period of time. Of course it’s just me, with a family this would be more complicated. But primary, underlying point is the same. A healthy vegetarian or vegan diet restricted to recyclable or compostable packaging is possible and cheaper.
Want to add in some junk food? Go for it but if you buy ice cream get it in a paperboard container. Cake and brownies can be baked from a mix that comes in paperboard boxes. If you must buy fruit juice (not all that healthy given the concentration of sugar) buy it in frozen concentrate in paper and dilute it a bit with extra water.
When I shop I have a few rules that I refuse to break. It limits my diet and I don’t get to eat things I like. For example, no yogurt because it only comes in plastic containers. I buy coffee in the vacuum sealed bricks packaged in a kind of plastic/aluminum. It’s not something I can recycle but it’s less waste than the other options. There’s only two options for coffee in this brick packaging… luckily, it’s good strong espresso and that works. Happily, it’s cheaper too.
The point is that my options are more limited and I don’t cry about it. We have to stop acting as though we are entitled to anything we can afford. We have to limit ourselves even if that means doing without things we like. The whole point of adapting to this climate emergency is that we will have to do without certain options and luxuries but we should be thankful if we are privileged enough that we can afford the things we need.
Oh, last, eating out at restaurant/take out: I almost never do. Probably once a month or less, just when family are visiting and it’s a group thing.
So, that’s my basic approach to grocery shopping for a climate-adapted diet. There are other details I didn’t cover that might be a consideration but for now I think that’s a start.
When daily life becomes constant crisis
From climate collapse to the continuous move of the U.S. further and further to the right, we seem to be living in very dark times. With the recent recent decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe and hints of more to come in the fall, not to mention the elections, it’s all a bit much. These are the things that dominate my daily thoughts and, like the gravity of the Earth, I don’t seem to be able to escape them. To be honest, I don’t exactly want to escape because to do so would seem wrong. This is our reality and I don’t want to escape or deny it. It’s true that at the moment I feel powerless to affect much change but the solution isn’t to ignore it or to pretend things are okay.
The result is that any happiness I feel is fleeting and strongly tinged in guilt. Visiting with family or friends is increasingly difficult because all I can think to talk about is climate collapse or one of our other current crises. And not only that, I find it difficult to listen to others share anything from “normal” life. I just don’t want to hear it because, again, it feels wrong to be talking about anything other than the crisis.
My life for many years has tended to be one of solitude as I live in a tiny house in the woods. It’s easy for me to be secluded, on my own. Perhaps that has contributed to how and what I think about. I hold myself apart because I don’t know how to participate in “normal” life and don’t want to because in my view, normal is destructive. And, something that frightens me almost as much as the destruction is the fact that so many people either don’t see it or actively seem to ignore it and carry on with a shrug of the shoulders. I think of the humans of the future looking back at our time. They will shake their heads and ask: What were they thinking? How could they let this happen?
Precarious
As is my usual routine I took my dog Cosmo out for our walk to the mailbox yesterday. Along the way I had a thought about the precariousness of our existence on Earth. We live in this sort of illusion as our daily life is wrapped in an assumption of stability. For the most part our human brains encounter the same environment everyday. Most of us wake up in the morning and are active during the day. The light from our sun scatters in our atmosphere, heating and lighting and otherwise presenting a world around us that seems stable. Somedays are cloudy, others sunny, often a mix of the two. As we go about our days we see a mix of human and non-human species, natural and human environments. We eat and breath, work, play, and talk.
But our life on this planet exists on the thinnest of onion skins. The biosphere of our planet, the zone in which all life happens is remarkably thin. While the actual thickness of the biosphere is not easily measured it generally falls within a range of 6.5 miles. At the highest we have birds flying as high as 1.1 mile and at the depth we have fish 5.2 miles below the water. There are examples of higher flying birds and deeper dwelling organisms but they are exceptions to the general. The diameter of the earth is 7,918 miles. The radius is 3,959 miles. Almost all life on our planet lives on the outer 6.5 miles of that.
As an amateur astronomer I’ve spent a good bit of time viewing and contemplating space and distance. For all of the beauty of the stars in the night sky, space is mostly empty. The space between stars is vast. The space between galaxies even more so. If we just turn our attention to our own solar system and what exists here well, again, it’s mostly empty space. Our Sun makes up 99.86% of the matter in our solar system. Our Earth, though it is the densest planet in the solar system, is only the tiniest proportion of the mass of our solar system. It barely registers. On the scale of our solar system our Earth is merely a tiny point separated from the sun and other planets by vast distances. To get a sense of it watch this amazing video by Wylie Overstreet in which three guys drove out to the desert of Nevada with a to-scale model to demonstrate the spacing of our solar system.
Our lived experience, our world, is just a precarious, thin layer on what amounts to a very tiny planet. On a clear, dark night I can lookup and see several thousand stars with my naked eyes. In remote locations such as mine there is little light pollution and the atmosphere disappears. It is in this star-lit darkness that I can begin to experience the Earth as a space ship of sorts. It really is a living space ship. In our orbit around the sun we move through space at 67,000 miles per hour. But remember, our solar system is also moving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 490,000 miles per hour. Of course we don’t see it or feel it directly but it is happening nonetheless.
Life on Earth is precarious. It’s stability is not permanent. Our sense of day-to-day continuity is something we’re used to and something we assume will continue. I’d suggest that if more people had a better sense of how it all works, had a better sense of just how thin the envelope of safety is, perhaps they might be more inclined to take seriously the warning of science regarding climate change, habitat loss and other aspects of biosphere stability. It’s too late to stop much of what we’ve set in motion but if we don’t make real change very soon we will experience the worst case scenarios.
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| A comparison of sea ice extent before the melting period began in March 2012 and after the melting period ended in September 2012. Purple line in these photos represents 1979-2000 median for Arctic ice. Image Credit: NOAA |
From the post at Earth Sky:
At the end of each year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases a report card on the state of the Arctic. In 2012, NOAA reports record low levels of sea ice extent, lower than we’ve seen before since the satellite era began in 1979. Plus, in June 2012, the Arctic experienced record low snow extent across the region. Greenland saw extreme melting during the summer of 2012, and the warmer temperatures and decreasing ice provided massive phytoplankton to grow. NOAA scientists said that air temperatures were on a par with the (relatively high) temperatures of the last decade, leading to, among other things, an increase in the length of the growing season along with tundra greenness in the Arctic. Climate models suggest that, in a warming climate, high latitudes such as the Arctic will be affected first, and so it seems to be. The 2012 Arctic Report Card is a peer-reviewed report that consists of 141 authors from 15 countries. If you ask a scientist who travels periodically to the Arctic or across Greenland, he or she will tell you that the landscape there is changing dramatically from year to year.
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| Arctic fox at Svalbard, Norway. In Fennoscandia, fewer than 200 individuals are estimated to remain. |
We, as a species, are nothing short of criminal.