BPSDBA little over a year ago one of the sites that I liked to go to for climate information suddenly went stagnant.
Instead of fresh postings there was just a link to a youtube video of Megadeath’s song “Countdown to Extinction” that stayed up for some weeks.
Just recently Survival Acres, a blog on food and food systems packed it in citing, unavoidable runaway climate catastrophe as rendering his efforts futile.
“Even my own ‘dire predictions’ regarding the looming threat to humanity by our collapse is already proving to be too conservative.”
In closing down “Fall of Hate” (“I’m Done“) BJ cites Chris Hedges excellent article “It’s not going to be OK” which is well worth the read, and refers to a very good post at Casaubon’s Book
You see, I’m starting to feel I can’t compete with reality – any actual attention to events as they unfold points up the fact that my own doomiest imaginings are being wildly exceeded.
really a paraphrase of Survival Acres, and who among us can not relate to that? have not been thinking it?
No doubt we will see more and more good blogs and sites sink into despair, and we will understand all too well why. After all, we have at most five years to make a 1,000 times more progress on the environmental front than we have managed in 50 years.
As we continue to slide into catastrophic climate change the issue of 
remaining effective and hopeful becomes both more urgent and difficult, and with it the crisis of purpose.
This is definitely a topic I will be returning to in the future as it is naturally a struggle I have as well. For the moment would like to mention this anecdote
“When the novelist Tristan Bernard was arrested with his wife by the Gestapo, he said to her: “The time of fear is over. The time of hope has begun”
and draw your attention to this post at Open Mind
But I have a message for every nay-sayer and advocate of “there’s nothing we can do about it.” I refuse to resign. I do not accept the inevitability of failure. But the way I feel right now, it takes a lot of audacity to be hopeful.
I accept that global warming is going to be a lot of pain for a lot of people. But I will allow my intellect to overrule my anger because it knows that what we do does make a difference. The more we change for the better, the better the future will be. Although the future is not likely to be good, there’s no excuse for not doing what we can to prevent its being worse.
If you don’t want to do anything about global warming … get the hell out of the way of those of us who do.
....all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--'Wait and hope'. Alexandre Dumas
“No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless There’s too much work to do”
Catholic Worker Dorothy Day
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 120 … still no evidence.
IMAGE CREDITS
Eclipse3oct_sombras by nexnearapha
Greenfyre's 
This rabid doomsayer admits he might be wrong and therefore urgent action is a good idea.
Just as it is all too late; the arch denier left office, the world economy tanks, solar cycle 24 is very late and it looks as though solar cycle 25 will be almost non existent. Light at the end of the tunnel
It is just that I do not see any government willing to do anywhere near enough. The light at the end of the tunnel is very dim.
However bad it is going to get, if we do nothing it will get much worse, much sooner. However unpleasant the future will be, I would like my children to have some future.
—-
Thank you for this post.
Each of us in the activist world has moments of hopelessness and feels the threat of despair.
But there is something within us, something immutable about the human spirit, that refuses to give up.
I celebrate and honor that part of us.
I feel bad for the Kool-Aid drinkers.
The planet is fine.
http: — //windfarms.wordpress.com/
—-
What a wonderful problem for humans to face: it requires a species-wide commitment to survive – on a level never before accomplished – upon a multi decade time line – after which it is probable that only a few, select, ferociously strong individuals will propagate. Returning to a stable climate will take thousands of years. And in that future the most valuable skill will be that of the techno-archeologist.
Isn’t this supposed to be the plot of a few dozen science fiction novels?
OK, I have not read them all. What comes next?
—-
fight or flight?
i choose to fight!
atomcat
the koolaid drinkers are those who don’t heed the scientific evidence. It is your opinion that is pure belief. because it is not based on the scienitfic evidence. The evidence of man made global warming is huge and gets stronger all the time.
You think you are smarter than the 97-99% of climate scientists who agree?
Forget the lists of skeptic scienitsts you have heard of, like the Oregon Petition, Senator Inhofe’s 413 or 650 “prominent scientists” who disagree with AGW and the IPCC.
Those lists are all phony. Every one of them. They are bogus padded lists. Padded with all kinds of people who are not climate scientists, and many who aren’t even scienitsts.
So what is your source of information? Name a name, and I can almost guarantee they are paid by oil and coal industries, if they are scientists.
Not always directly but with money funneled through right wing propaganda mills and astro turf groups who set up phony organizations all staffed by the same people, to make it seem like there’s a big grass roots movement against either the climate science or the clean energy solutions.
Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward
Gwendolyn Brooks
GreenFyre,
A related post might be to explore what is denial, and what is eco-fatigue? I’m not sure we are understanding enough about what can mobilize the public for change and what is tuning them out.
We have technologies to reduce emissions and these could be introduced tomorrow, if government policies and industry programs would put the price on carbon with firm targets and international agreements. Of course, that’s not enough: we also need massive investment in a low-carb energy diet.
Some countries (including Canada, where I live) have a responsiblity to lead the way and find solutions, because we are a developed country. Having said that, our government just cut the funding to climate research in universities. Apparently, we’ll have to provide the innovations, climate assessments and current science without our scientists, who will need to go elsewhere to work. Our people will also freeze to death, because our government cut our wind and solar programs. 😦
However, Obama was just here to discuss cap and storage and other potential agreements between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. 🙂
It’s not too late for the necessary changes. That’s the important message.
So the question is, how to engage the public in an energy revolution?
atomcat
……….
The planet is fine.
#######################
“The planet is just fine” — that’s rather like a cook saying to the lobster, “relax — the stove and pot will be just fine”.
—-
How about educating the deniers? Shoot, I forgot, they are too stubborn and closed minded to be educated. They don’t want to understand the science, they only want to show they are better at picking on and trashing other people and the Earth. Scientists would like to ignore them, but you know, just like teenagers, the more they are ignored, the madder they get.
Hey js,
It looks to me like questions from skeptics and the uniformed have always been welcomed. But obstruction and denialism are neither welcome, nor wise. Sane and sober scientists along with public policy experts conclude that we should not delay, not wait any longer to attack this problem. So anyone asking for delay is acting in a dangerously destructive way. I invite you to observe the short term economic motivation to most expressions of denialism. Denialism campaigns are funded in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually – most all of it from the carbon fuel consortium.
If you are a climate skeptic, you might try to separate climate science from monetary ideology. You can take any stand you like on the economy, but the core of climate science is really locked down. And attacking the science is like knocking a hole in the bottom of the boat while everyone else is trying to bail.
Fear is the middle part of the journey.
Once we realize that its survival and not civilization that our efforts are for, then there is hope.
2009 Will Be a Year of Panic
http://seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php
…a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It’s an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us. People no longer know what they value. They don’t know what to believe.
—-
Greenfyre:
Thanks for highlighting my post. Although despair is an understandable response at this point, that was not the intent of my final post. My goal was to shock people into the realization of how bad things truly are, in the hopes that as a society, we can find some way (through a massive, concerted effort) to mitigate the fallout. Millions– possibly billions of people are going to die, and within our lifetimes unless radical countermeasures are adopted immediately; even then, the possibility exists that we are simply too late.
Unfortunately, I’m more convinced than ever that our massive social/economic/political inertia is going to prevent meaningful reforms from taking place from the top down. Therefore, my intent was to say that the time for blogging is over, the time to prepare for imminent collapse is upon us. Talk to your families, talk to your friends, and by all means, do whatever you can. Indeed, that will be the only way change can truly come. Waiting for our “leaders” has never been a viable strategy, and now it’s become suicidal.
—-
Despair is not adaptive. Tempting, sometimes, but definitely not adaptive.
Since you mention Sauron in your reply to the first comment here: I find it helpful to consider the situation through a “Lord of the Rings” lens. Frodo and co. didn’t exactly have much of a chance to win, or even just survive, either. Yet in their situation, as in ours, the only way to have even the *tiniest* chance lay in stubbornly refusing to give up.
Same’s true in just about every tough situation, really, but people tend to overlook that it remains true even in the case of astronomically bad chances of success. The only absolutely guaranteed defeat is the one you resign yourself to before it has even happened. You may only have a chance of one in a million to win if you keep fighting – but one in a million is still better than zero.
There are situations in which you have to do some sort of cost-benefit analysis to find out if giving up on a nearly hopeless fight is better than keeping it up – wars, for instance, are certainly often better ‘given up on’ than prolonged indefinitely. But the survival of the majority of the human population of this planet along with most of its biodiversity is, in my view, an absolute value, one that cannot be relativised in any way. If the stakes are *this* high, giving up can never be an acceptable option.
Also, on a moral level, what we’re fighting – a way of life, a way of thinking that puts short-term individual gain over longterm collective (planetary) survival – is actually, IMO, an evil of absolute proportions, kinda like Sauron. 😉 Some evils you just have to keep fighting if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.
(Then again – I’m fairly new to this. Ask me again in three years, when I’m disillusioned and burnt out.)
BTW, I’m not sure if I’ve ever commented before. In case I didn’t: Nice blog. I’ve been lurking for a while.
—-
Its all hitting the fan now…
So america thought that it was going to be able to take a 2C addition in GW in its stride. That it would survive better than less developed states. Its technology would save it. Not so….
Droughts ‘may lay waste’ to parts of US
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/26/drought-us-climate-change
…
The world’s pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.
….
Sacramento in California, for example, could face heatwaves for up to 100 days a year. “We are close to a threshold in a very large number of American cities where uncomfortable heatwaves make cities uninhabitable,” Field told the Senate’s environment and public works committee.
—-
Convince the world there is a problem? I cannot even convince my family that we need to move. We do not have enough water now and according to the scientists it will only get worse.
A friend who is also a pessimist lives less than a meter above sea level, she cannot convince her family to move either.
I would prefer to move now to be a part of the next community, not wait until I am just another climate refugee. There will be climate refugees both internal and external.
Although where I would move to also has water shortage problems, but not as severe with less population and less evaporation.
I see some hopefull signs that we may try to avoid the worst, but I see no sign that we are preparing for what is already inevitable.
Yes there is significant uncertainty on temperatures and sea level rise. However the conservative way the the models are put together means that the problem can only be worse not better.
The situation will not be stabilised by the end of the century, but continue to worsen.
Even if we cannot stop climate change it is still very important to try and slow the changes down, so that mankind and nature has time to adapt. Particularly as most of the adaption will be reactive rather than in advance.
Do the deniers even care that the planet is being destroyed, or will one them look out over a desert and say “Yes YES, I own all of Texas”
—-
http://www.elyrics.net/read/l/leonard-cohen-lyrics/democracy-lyrics.html
…
Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.
It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
…
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
— Leonard Cohen
——————————-
It’s the last song on this NPR program, free:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=267972899
—-
Excellent site greenfyre.wordpress.com and I am really pleased to see you have what I am actually looking for here: this .. as it’s taken me literally 2 hours and 47 minutes of searching the web to find you (just kidding!) so I shall be pleased to become a regular visitor 🙂
“Global Warming/Climate Change” is a government sponsored “red herring proxy” for discussing and dealing with the evolving exigencies of “PeakOil”. The planet has actually entered a secular cooling cycle as evidenced by the transition from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24. Google “solar cycle 23 global cooling” and “Rhodes Fairbridge solar inertial theory of climate change” to get a clue. The problem is not “Global Warming/Climate Change”. The problem is “Peak Warming/Peak Oil”. This IS the worst case scenario where declining fuels availability meets declining average annual temperatures. This winter Russia turned off gas supplies to Western Europe not because of politics and nonpayment, but because they needed to address increased winter heating requirements in areas hit by historically cold weather.
—-
I’d also like to rebut John’s statement by pointing to peer-reviewed studies of the interaction between climate change and peak oil, which were helpfully reviewed in plain English by the Oil Drum today. Note that one of these papers is by James Hansen, whom John may not recognize as the singular leading voice on climate change science.
I’d also like to mention Lockwood’s 2007 review paper that surveys the existing understanding of solar influences on climate. It concludes “the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”
I’d also like to note two things about solar cycles:
1) Research into solar cycles actually confirms a CO2 climate sensitivity of 3C. If that sentence doesn’t make sense, John, I suggest you RTFR.
2) We’re at the bottom of a solar cycle now, as you so kindly point out. There are two possible outcomes: A prolonged minimum (very rare) or a return to the climbing phase of a solar cycle (inevitable). If the solar cycle begins climbing (which is very likely), what will happen to the temperatures?