"Ivar heals horses by praying over them and builds a pond as a haven for migrating birds and forms conjectures about bird-speech."
I would like to make a career of forming conjectures about bird-speech, though it would be important that such conjectures are never actually pursued far enough to determine whether or not they are factually correct.
Reading this left me wishing for a healthy living landscape rather than the ominously life-devoid world we inhabit today. The Bronx in the 1970s it was practically a tropical jungle compared to any place I've seen in 30 years. We had fireflies by the thousands, swarms of sparrows and pigeons and blue jays you could call down with some bird seed or pieces of bread, praying mantises, monarchs, black swallowtails, yellow swallowtails, green garter snakes, striped garter snakes, cardinals, robin red-breasts, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bumble bees, yellowjackets, white moths and on and on. I mean, this wasn't some rural sanctuary, you could watch New York City's graffiti-covered elevated trains roar by overhead as all this was going on.
No one talks about this, but I tell all you young whippersnappers: Earth was once bursting with life in a way it no longer is.
About a month ago my cat captured a fledgling blue jay. I got it away from her unharmed and it was able to fly away. The next day I was outside reading and a mature blue jay landed close by, looked me straight in the eye and started yelling — I know this sounds crazy but nothing like that had ever happened before. I apologized and told her I was keeping the cat inside and her children were safe. She flew off and they’re back to ignoring me.
Arundhati Roy has finally, formally been targeted for imminent political imprisonment. Let this be a lesson to any mouthy artist/activist who won't get with the authoritarian program. Empathy is over, and your Booker Prize, celebrated literary prowess, and sense of humor don't give you license to tell the truth about anything:
Have been watching the goings-on at the bleeding edge of Machine culture and noting some significant things. First, there were murmurings a few years back of trying to impose a ban on AI for military use in things like battlefield drones and robots, but those quaint notions from a bygone era before World War III became so sexy have been thrown aside in favor of a full-on AI and robotics arms race. Chinese robodogs can now reliably put a bullet into your eyeball 98 percent of the time, exceeding human marksmen:
The US, meanwhile, is planning to overwhelm any Chinese attempt to retake Taiwan with a "hellscape" of swarms of nightmarish AI-driven creatures emerging from the sea to kill as many Chinese as possible. The US has long been world leader in the creation of nightmarish hellscapes so underestimate it at your peril:
AI itself is quickly disappearing into the spooky realms of the "security state" and increasingly looks like it will be allowed only to bleed jobs from the last remnants of the working class, but slowly enough to indefinitely defray calls for UBI or other measures that might serve to make life less precarious and miserable for humans trying and failing to out-compete intelligent machines:
Overall, and despite the glossy AI/robotics cutting-edge patina, the Machine wants what it has always wanted: power, control, money, and war without end. And now that the "intelligent robots" have at last arrived, no puny humans will be allowed to get in the way of that agenda any longer.
Yes, I'd call that a very early use of AI by Israel to eliminate "targets". Targets, I expect, will in years ahead expand to include anyone, anywhere, be they idealistic American college kids, South African anti-Apartheid activists, or instinctively colonialism-averse Irish people, who even know what the word "genocide" means.
Had a friend back in the day who worked for a spooky MIC corporation. He told me one time of how he'd gone to visit one of their subsidiaries out on Long Island as part of some project. And how it struck him that everyone in the vast building was wearing a yarmulke. So when Israel says Ireland will suffer "severe consequences" for displaying empathy for Palestinians (or for merely acknowledging such a thing as "Palestinians" exist), well, dollars to donuts Irish people are going to die. Hope I'm wrong.
Hope you are wrong on this one. Asassinations have been ongoing a long while but this stuff costs and provides diminishing returns and new vulnerabilities for the complicit imperium.
Nice! 😊This latest intelligent stuff likely speeds things up, but what is left after a crash into the buffers? Apparently the first iteration demands giganticism to pay for itself, includes Orwellian propaganda bubbles, and will demand incredible electricity (and copper), and unlimited very very good batteries. Climate (Paul's aside this month) will do its increasingly dramatic thing. Insects, or rather lack of them, or even the 'forever chemicals' might have a say? I will be long gone but admit to keep squinting at the cold blob in the N Atlantic charts and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf bothering over the calculations for AMOC.
Ireland seems likely over the next couple of decades to be survivable but perhaps will see high and low temps here that have not been experienced in God knows how long. I suspect Ireland will be okay(ish) but not immune to broader "global weirding". It's going to be a bumpy ride but I'd rather be here than on the American East Coast or a place like Phoenix, AZ. 🥵
Hope you are right on this one; nowhere sensible to migrate to these days. Not the first civilisation to get into such a fix, but the first to have gone seriously global and to have triggered a new geological epoch, with the natural mass extinction to go with it.
I am on the bigger island at your back and too old to matter, but still ponder the 'mechanisms'. Didn't Paul start off his series with 'Black Ships'? And I was reminded the other day by British journalist Ed Conway ('Material World') of the forced 19thC closure of the sub-continent's salt industry, that the late M. Ghandi went on about.
An equally sinister development of AI is the potential destruction of the Artist and creativity in society. You can go to https://udioai.ai/ and create your own music now. No need for anyone to write and perform the songs. Same with Hollyweird and movies and who knows...perhaps someday no need for people to write novels
In the future robots will be famous to 15 people. My own kids are in the economic crosshairs of this phenomenon (son an artist, daughter a serious filmmaker). I actually find those toys to be lots of fun to play around with, and don't actually see them as a threat to artists because there is almost no art produced in the United States at all anyway, defining art as works made for the love of it versus for the money.
When was the last time Hollywood produced any art? The early 1970s? And even then it was only clueless producers throwing money at things they didn't understand before the money men reasserted control and it's been shlock-by-committee ever since.
The other thing is, AI is precluded from producing human art no matter how well they fake it. Even if they became sentient they are not having human experiences so what value could their art have to humans? None. For corporations, who are similarly precluded from understanding human art, of course they can and will use it for cost-cutting the shlock they produce anywhere, any way, anyhow they can.
Novels, again that is so gate-kept by a liberal publishing priesthood I don't care if that industry burns to the ground. Art, like religion, can be damaged by the demands of commerce but not ultimately destroyed by it.
It seems that the only meaningful question answered by Generative AI is "How can money and power be concentrated even further upward?" In the meantime, many are getting caught up in the appeal of a shiny new thing and/or expected to bow before the electronic golden calf.
I'm still holding out a last hope it turns out to be as dangerous as they claim and explodes in their faces. That said, it is surely trending fast in the direction you claim. So reading the tea leaves today I'd say we are likely looking at an infinitely stable dictatorship run by the same American psychopaths who brought us Ukraine and Gaza.
It'll be either that, or an infinitely stable Chinese dictatorship. Really, the only difference will be which things you are not allowed to criticize under pain of death by robo-pooch.
I just got back from Dublin (happy late Bloomsday) and I was thrilled by the rain and cool weather. But I live in Denver where it's been 99 F and high ozone warnings so....
Climate change is happening, as it always did. We are currently in a grand solar minimum, which may explain the unusually cold weather. People falling over in the heat at sporting events is hardly a new phenomenon. The green agenda is a depopulation agenda which is profoundly anti human.
I celebrated Father’s Day on Sunday by bringing my children to Divine Liturgy for their first time. It was wonderful to be there with them, and I appreciate any suggestions from Abbey readers on encouraging family to join you at the Orthodox Church when their only church experience otherwise is with the generic evangelical Protestant churches that dominate the U.S. these days.
That is simply wonderful, Graham! How old are your children? I’m cradle orthodox and so my kids started coming to church from the time they were 40 days old (that is in the tradition of when Jesus was presented at the temple and so orthodox moms stay home the first 40 days and then bring the baby to liturgy to be “churched”). If they are adults or older teens, I would encourage just letting the liturgy do its thing on them. Sometimes I think we overwhelm people with church history and doctrine as opposed to them just experiencing the beauty that is an orthodox liturgy. It is meant to engage all of the senses. I would be upfront with them, though about how much it does mean to you because that in of itself might encourage them to continue to attend.
Thanks Amy! They’re all between 10-13 years old. I thanked them for coming with me and told them how much it meant to have them there. Otherwise, I answered what questions I could and just let them experience liturgy. Glad to hear my instincts about it were right!
I'm curious why the most benign liberal places become or are be coming totalitarian .. Canada, Australia. Maybe the US has a chance because we are much less conformist or more disagreeable in general? I hope so.. Any thoughts?
I think it was Jung that pointed out the higher the culture the deeper the shadow...this in reference to Germany prior to Nazism. German culture produced Beethoven,Brahms,Goethe , Schiller...and Auswitch.
I recall Chris Hedges once claiming that in the West you first get Huxley and only then, if you can't be bought off by the hedonic pleasures on offer, you get Orwell. It's a little like that Frank Zappa quote:
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Basically, energy is getting expensive, the quality of the land-base is running down, decades of neoliberalism has gutted industry in favor of games with finance capitalism, and the BRICS+ nations are exposing the West as in radical decline. Nations like the UK and USA are oligarchies that don't even make much pretense of having representative governments serving ordinary people, and the rest trail along (increasingly nervously) in the wake of the US imperium.
So I view it more as the mask falling away and exposing what was there all along.
'The society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally' Christopher Dawson
This seems to be the crux of the matter....While the left is very secular and powerful there is an interest in Christianity bubbling beneath the surface.....away from the centers of power for sure but evident to any who have eyes to see..
Send some of that Irish weather my way. I'm in one of those corners of the US currently being fried, after having had quite tolerable temperatures so far this month.
Got up early and drove to a quiet, undeveloped lake west of town this morning to paddle my kayak, listen to the woods wake up, and hopefully catch a bass or two. Pulled up to the landing and saw I left my life vest at home, which make going out not only (very slightly) risky but illegal. The odds of a CO coming along and writng me a ticket were low, but I didn't want to chance it. Drove back home, got my vest, and headed to a reservoir about 2 miles away where I paddled my kayak, listened to the Machine wake up, and had my flies pestered by fish too small to eat them.
I'm fortunately not staring down robot armies, though AI has been giving me some fits in the summer class I'm teaching. Looking back over the last year and a half, I think few students are using it to create writing better than they could produce on their own. A lot don't want to use it at all. But a few in my current class seem to be addicted to ChatGPT and their submissions barely resemble what was assigned. And they appear oblivious to that divergence. I fear I'll be dealing with similar cases quite a bit in the year ahead.
I am looking forward to the upcoming discussion of Everyday Saints though, which I've gotten most of the way through.
I find that very interesting that going out without a life vest is illegal.
In relation to your comment, I can tell you that France was governed during the lockdown by the government's intimidation with its emergency measures threatening the citizens with fines if they left the house, and the intimidation was very successful, on the whole. Nobody wanted to fork out 130 euros or so if he or she were caught outside without a GOOD REASON. Not a shot fired. (I am not a great fan of guns, but still.)
The next time somebody gets rabid about the evils of capitalism in the oligarchy, maybe we could talk about the evils of capitalism outside of the oligarchy ?
In early lockdown, our governor forbade people who didn't share a house to sit together in a boat. But the life vest rule makes sense since, especially in summer, a lot of people who have little familiarity with boats or waterways will take to the water and find it can be surprisingly easy to get in trouble after a small change in weather or some careless maneuvering. As can more experienced boaters, for that matter.
There is an Icelandic author whom I like, whose name is Jon Kalmann Stefansson. In his trilogy of which the first book has been translated into English as "Between heaven and hell", but in French, as "Between the sky and the earth", there is a passage where in the early twentieth century, a fisherman on one of the small boats gets distracted thinking about Milton's "Paradise Lost", and goes out on his service without his slicker, and this... distraction costs him his life, as a storm brews up and he freezes to death for lack of that slicker. You might enjoy Stefansson as an author, because he is writing about the difference in worlds between one where the government puts up signs and fines you to discourage you from engaging in behavior that ENGAGES YOUR LIFE and possible death, and a government which does not put up electronic signs above its highways with "everybody vaccinated, everybody protected". I think that you could make a case for saying that a government which does not fine, and put up those signs is one in which the wild(s) has a bigger place than the other.
Maybe I would have died ages ago in a.. wilder place, who knows ? Maybe most of us would (have).
To some of the people around me, the idea of being a creature is repulsive. It is synonym for not being in control of your choices, and who you want to be/become. Not being in control of your... identity.
To me, the idea of being a creature goes with the idea of being born. In Latin, the word "nature" is in relation to "natus", to be born. The very structure of "to be born" is that of a... passive, and that is what is most repugnant to many people. But it is possible that the "pass" of "pass-ive" is in relation to "pass-us", which in the Credo, seems to mean "to die". It is also in relation to the idea of suffering. And the word "PASt" suggests something that is behind, and not out in front. Just like all those... dead people are behind us, in a way. What is born is subjected to birth and to death.
I notice that there is no symmetry between "to be born" and "to die". "To be born" is a passive form, whereas "to die" is not.
Years of mulling this over in my time have convinced me that all this is very important to the way we construct our reality.
The word "creature" bears the mark of the Latin passive form, "to be created". It is also called... the SUPINE, and everybody knows that what is supine is lying down, and not standing up with a sword, for example, READY FOR ACTION, and for a fight.
Obviously, the passive form is also associated with the feminine aspect of existence, as in.. being created, and not creating oneself.
...
Over here in France, lots of people are very nervous about the Assembly/parlement being dissolved. A lot of people over here are very convinced that they know exactly what "fascism" is, and that THEY ARE RIGHT (whether they are on the "right" or not).
They seem unable to take into account the way the political spectrum has shifted recently, and the lines between "right" and "left" have become terribly blurred. They need... to feel safe in the idea that their beliefs are the Right Ones.
Probably lots of people felt this way before WW2...
History tends to repeat itself, but not "à l'identique".
On climate change….i am not a denier by any means. I remember sleepless nights on the second floor of our modest cape cod house when I was a child with an electric fan blowing directly on me. Our summers now are about ten degrees hotter than those and I cannot imagine what we would do without air conditioning. Probably all sleep on the screen porch or in the one room which is larger, cooler, with high ceilings, shade, and a lower threshold. At least we have windows. Houses today are not built to take advantage of any natural cooling, low ceilings, few windows, no cross ventilation, built by the thousands in former corn fields without shade of any kind.
What I am angry about in climate activism is its stupidity. We are not going to generate enough power to store billions of social media photos and power the grid as well as charge electric vehicles which are not really practical in a large country like the US with huge open distances in the heartlands, with solar and windmills. Nor is a planet covered in fragile glass panels whose very construction adds to the burdens extraction puts on people and places, and huge wind turbines along beautiful coastline appealing. It is a massive destruction of the environment for limited gains. We are running far ahead of ourselves, consuming more electricity everyday while shunning the only currently available real solution to electric generation- nuclear.
I am not at all knowledgeable about this subject, but that the rhetoric about climate change is devoid of both realistic solutions and an acknowledgment of how little technology is actually impacting it. It seems to me that once huge geological forces are in a period of instability it is the height of hubris to assume we can affect them, especially while not acknowledging the burden the internet has put on the grid. We are crippling economies in the name of net zero while acting as if Prometheus is around the corner with a new solution to our energy needs. It would be silly if it wasn’t so dangerous.
A cartoon I saw recently of a man running a gasoline generator to charge his electric car really did say it all. Here we still burn coal to generate electricity. How is this better than nuclear power?
There was the case of a young documentary filmmaker who had gotten a lot of attention for her first film, about environmental damage to the oceans. She was celebrated, won awards, and then she made a terrible mistake. Her mistake was thinking telling the truth was why her art was popular.
In her second film, she made your point, that what Paul would call "neo-environmentalism" was actually no solution at all. That film was essentially frozen out of the conversation and buried. She was threatening exposure of "renewable energy" as just a money-spinning scam rather than any sort of real solution (to a very real problem). The only "solution" would be some critical mass of people opting not to live such energy-intensive lifestyles, which appears a sort of pipedream.
Thank you. This is exactly the point, we have become so much more consumptive because of the internet, the ease of online shopping putting thousands of trucks on residential roads, devices and data storage, because of the needs of the machine for us to continually escalate consumption, when returning to earlier patterns of less consumption would directly benefit the environment.
It’s always frightening when you directly confront the heavy censorship we are subject to.
My take on this, which got me into trouble with my erstwhile green colleagues when I was running Dark Mountain, is both that the climate is obviously changing as a result of the industrial revolution and its consequences, and, as you say, that the proposed 'solutions' will do little or nothing to tackle this. The problem is the existence of industrial society, and nobody wants to look that one in the face.
The number of current major problems that cannot be ameliorated ( few could be solved) because the powers that be refuse to look them in the face is getting bigger.
I live in north Texas, where a lot of these windmills are being put up. The land mass taken up by these things is insane. I've never been a fan of the green energy push (well, I don't trust the people usually pushing it), but these windmills always seemed extra tragic to me. Paul actually put it best when he said something to the effect of "there is something seriously wrong when the supposed 'nature lovers' want to put a bunch of loud, giant, spinning towers on every open hillside." I've had a lot of success making people stop and think with that line.
There's a large cross built beside the highway in Groom, Texas. If it wasn't for the wind farms that now surround it, it would be the tallest thing on the landscape there. Quite symbolic.
If it's at all possible to ask this question without immediately attracting fierce disagreement... What is the actual situation with the ol' climate change?
My general view has always been that (a) the climate has always varied, and therefore (b) it's quite possible that we are coming out of a mini-Ice Age rather than experiencing a heating-up as such, (c) nobody truly knows how much effect emissions etc. have on this process, and (d) even if we were sure that e.g. carbon emissions were making things worse, the fact that China and other places intend to burn fossil fuels into the foreseeable future makes any real mitigation impossible. The whole Net Zero thing is therefore a silly, misguided effort to achieve the impossible. The huge amount of research by climatologists is not a conspiracy in the silly sense but there is lots of research funding to be had for those who accept the general climate change consensus and precious little for those who want to reject it, so it seems entirely possible that the scientific consensus (if there even is one) is way off.
Now, I also think though that pollution is nasty, trees are good, roads are bad, the small and local beats the big and industrial and all that stuff (I'm a subscriber here, after all!) and I would be heartily in favour of lots of sensible measures that would make things cleaner and greener and more sustainable. I just feel that whenever people mention climate change as such I need to count my spoons.
I really do think this is a real problem that a lot of capitalist hustlers have rushed in to provide faux-solutions for.
So if it had to be broken down to a simple political binary:
- The "left" are correct that climate change is real, and are wrong/lying that it can be fixed with so-called "renewables".
- The "right" are correct that climate change is being used for money-spinning and to get political agendas pushed through, and wrong/lying that it's not a real/serious problem.
The actual situation is we are, as Paul said, hiding from the reality and living as if this is hopefully not happening/not going to affect us (much).
I view the problem of climate change as in every way a symptom of modernity. It's what psychologists apparently call a 'wicked problem'. That is to say, a massively complex thing that us normies can't begin to understand, and which has no easy or obvious 'solution' - if it has one at all, which it probably doesn't.
I can't see any reason myself to deny the science behind the enhanced greenhouse effect, which in principle even I can understand. The problem, fairly obviously, is industrial modernity. We depend for our very existence on digging up and burning vast reservoirs of ancient sunlight, and that process is wrecking the planet. Or perhaps, rather than 'wrecking' it, it is simply shifting it into a new state - something that's happened many times before, of course. But this state may not be conducive to human civilisation, or even human life.
It's almost as if we were meant to live humbly, in communion with nature, and that trying to break free of that instruction has ballsed everything up ...
I suppose the trouble is that I don't have any way of knowing for myself whether the scientists' account of these things is true, and I am a bit sceptical by nature, so I feel just as minded to be wary of their claims as I was of e.g. the more extreme claims about Covid-19's virulence and the measures needed to contain it. I suppose I trust scientific claims less and less the more closely they relate to government policy.
Scientific data is meant to derive its authority from the fact that experiments can be replicated and their results verified, but this is only true for the small proportion of people who have the ability to verify the data. The rest of us have to take scientific claims on authority, just as we take historical claims or religious claims on authority, and I suppose I consider the scientific/governmental double-act to be rather lacking in credibility. Not because they are all necessarily trying to deceive people, but because it has all become such a huge extravaganza (and the underlying problem is perhaps so "wicked") that there are any number of perverse incentives and vested interests in operation. Perhaps it's silly but I could just as easily believe it all to be a mistake as believe any specific prediction about our future climate.
But I suppose we all have to believe someone in these matters, and to believe that nothing is in fact happening is simply to trust someone else instead.
Global average temperatures track, in a boringly predictable way, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And it's easy to get the historical ppm of CO2 from things like ice cores.
In that sense, it's only confusing to people eager to confuse themselves. Sort of like looking at a chest X-ray the doctor is showing you of your tumor-filled lungs and telling him, "well, so much of my lung capacity is still tumor-free, I don't think this is a real problem..."
Where would I be able to see the kind of information you refer to, please? The term "historical ppm of CO2" is already a little beyond me so I would have to take it slowly!
The best-informed person I actually know is my sister, who studied archeology and covered a lot about different climactic periods as part of that. She seems quite ambivalent about it all herself - very keen on obvious environment stuff like clean water and recycling but agnostic about man-made climate change as such.
The graph in this document shows the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature change across time. You'll notice the graphs overlay one another in an almost identical fashion:
Personally, I've moved on from this sort of staid document to borderline catastrophist updates at places like the below. That's just me though, as I like to stay ahead of the curve with my dire predictions and I have an absurdist sense of humor about this culture's tragicomic stumble to the boneyard:
Covid has holed below the waterline any trust in 'establishment' authorities for many people, including me. In terms of climate change, however, you would have to ask what incentive there would be for thousands of scientists in dozens of fields over many decades to lie. Or what likelihood there is of them all being wrong. As Optera says below, the basics are pretty clear even to us non-specialists. Also, we can see with our own eyes the obvious change in temperatures and weather patterns. All that being true, I would have to have a good reason to listen to the dissidents, and so far I haven't seen it. Still, I'm not at all in favour of shutting down the conversation.
I don't think there is any incentive for these people to lie, as such. But I work in university research and I see some of the sausages being made, and it seems to be that there would be enormous obstacles facing a researcher who wanted to call any key element of the consensus into question. Researchers have to go where the money is if they want to have a career, and while that doesn't require dishonesty I think it does tend to mean working within the existing consensus most of the time. Once a scientific consensus becomes the locus of huge government subsidy and media attention I think it's likely to be very hard for anyone to correct it, at least in the short to medium term.
You need to realize this works in the other direction as well. Many scientists feel and display enormous reticence to call an emergency an emergency, so there has been and continues to be massive pressure to not induce panic by, well, telling the truth about how hosed we are. So much so that it's become a joke:
“Live humbly, in communion with nature” Yep! It says in Genesis that Adam was placed in Eden to “dress and keep it” The Hebrew for that phrase could also be rendered “to serve and observe closely” An author I respect has written about the post fossil fuels future, John Michael Greer. This future will be upon us certainly a century from now or earlier. Dreams of wind , solar, tidal , fusion, nuclear energy will not enable a business as usual industrial future. Greer projects in his books The Retro Future, The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent, what will happen (not happy however). I think with applied wisdom and love the earth has the ability to support the REAL needs of even our current population, but that applied wisdom and love and the needed re-engineering is not coming our way and circumstances will cruelly force unpleasant change instead.
Obviously the climate has shifted endlessly throughout human history. Nobody suggests otherwise. This time around however, we are the volcanoes. And given the massive and very rapid temperature shifts that such things have precipitated in the past, we had better hold tight.
Agreed! I don't think humans can change the climate. It seems they can change the weather though. Remember the London Fog? Caused by coal burning.
One of the Medieval European plagues was said to have been caused by ash, from a volcano, settling over central Europe during the growing season. Crops failed, livestock starved, then people got weak and sick.
It wasn't the rats running 90 miles an hour from one town to the next with their biting fleas. This is known due to the impeccable records kept by local towns of the outbreaks and when they occurred.
Ash--or anything in large amounts, coal smoke, aluminum, you name it, manmade or not, can affect the weather.
This is where I reveal my cards--I don't know, actually.
But now I wonder if anyone knows. I hate, like anyone else, to see pollution, waste, dumping and poisoning. But the climate change people seem less concerned with that and more focused on curbing human activities like travel, eating meat, having babies.
I am leery of the word climate and the word science, at least how they are bandied about these days.
Well, none of us can know because we have no expertise in the area. Can smoking cause lung cancer? I don't know, personally, and have no way of finding out. But the experts in the field have concluded after decades of study that it can, and this is one reason I don't smoke.
It's worth asking whather 'the climate change people' are actually trying to curb human activites, or instead trying to curb *excess* human activities. It's a matter of limits. Is it a 'human activity' to fly across the planet for a meeting - or to spend all day on the Internet? These things have not existed for 99% of human history. Just because we like them or have got used to them, it doesn't mean we have some kind of right to them, or that they're not damaging.
From where I'm sitting, I have to say, most of the rhetoric denying climate change sounds like toddlers screaming because they're not allowed any more ice cream. I'm not referring to you here, by the way. But that's how it seems.
Yes 100% have to do more on the ground level—our waterways with pharma products, plastics, aluminum…that damage is real and ongoing.
But, with the word climate, I see an ideology— like a trojan horse in which an opportunistic parasite can use to destroy “ the flesh it feeds on” (Although a proper parasite wouldn’t go that far).
My problem is I don’t trust the narrative and I now give zero f’s about appearing compliant to it.
Somewhere I heard that the power of the sun is so magnificent, so huge, so ridiculously glorious, that no human act can outweigh its sunniness.
Well, we can believe what we want. Nature will do what it is doing, in response to our abuses of it.
And you are being compliant to a narrative, even if you don't realise it. That's why all of your arguments are familiar, as is the language they are couched in.
Incidentally, fewer humans on the planet - a trend which is occuring entirely naturally as we choose to have fewer children - would be a good thing in my view. Again, you're assuming that the current state of play is normal, when it;'s anything but. When my grandad was born, there were two billion people on Earth. That was already double what his grandparents had experienced. There are now eight billion. The increase is unprecedented and doesn't benefit either humans or the rest of life on Earth. The coming natural decline seems like good news to me.
Looking forward very much to the retrospective, Paul. It seems like the Christian East would carry one along a path in which one could see Jeffers' Dark Mountain, Moses' Dark Mountain, and Yeshua's Bright Mountain as one and the same mountain--very much the sacred mountain, the high place, which we need to find as our center of gravity again in these times...
A nice thought, Graham, but not the same mountain. Moses’ could be touched and was feared, as in the law of sin and death. Yeshua’s can be lived and embraced with joy, as in the law of the spirit of life. Sorry, but think it’s an important distinction.
I enjoyed the Huxley talk - impressed by the interest from the Estonian audience, and the standard of their English! I found Brave New World and interesting but not particularly well written book but also his Perennial Philosophy made an impact when young as well as his psychedelic experiences. Interesting that you have gone for a more orthodox (in both senses) kind of religion, rather than the hippy mysticism that was so common in the sixties, but has flowed into much New Age stuff now. Huxley was a pretty serious student and practitioner of Hindu philosophy - it might be worth exploring how that, rather than Christianity, may be more conducive to living with the Machine, rather than raging against it or escaping it?
For those who may be interested, I have published a review of Paul's novel, The Wake, over at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf, along with my own rambling thoughts about apocalypses.
Thanks, Paul, to the link to your talk on "Brave New World." Coincidently, my wife and just read it. She for the first time. Me ... well, I won't go into how long ago I read it. In any case, it has sparked numerous conversations between us on related topics, and we were both amazed at how prophetic Huxley was. Frighteningly prophectic, the more I think about it. I look forward to queuing up your talk for after dinner tonight. By the way, also unseasonably cold here in the Pacific Northwest. Our bees aren't particularly happy, and my shivering tomatoes mutter epithets at me every time I walk by them. On the other hand, this has been a great year for wild rhododendrons. Cheers.
Having lived in Northern Ireland for 4 years, I miss the 'summers' terribly. I'm in California (where I was also born and raised) now and temps north of 100F / 38C are not uncommon. I remember when it would get into the low 80/26 range in NI and people would start to panic and talk about a 'heat wave'. I guess, relatively speaking, it was, but it always made me chuckle. Enjoy your holiday!
Climate change is hard to deny, particularly for one who has lived more than seventy years. Technically, climate is simply weather conditions tracked for thirty or more years. Scientific tracking, one would expect, would account for hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, and longer time periods, as accurately, and honestly as possible. Unfortunately, the anti-human climate change religion that is attacking human progress today is not scientific in that way.
Their methodology has become bastardized by their Malthusian zeal. They are thus selective in their data collection to deliberately skew results in the direction of cooling or heating that supports whatever theory catches their fancy. For some time that has been a cataclysmic warming that MUST be acted upon to SAVE THE PLANET.
They are supporting changes that are shortsightedly causing ecologic, economic, medical, social, and political devastation. They are doing so while seeing and portraying themselves as angels of mercy while bullying anyone who dares to question their findings and policies. They are destroying our forests and polluting our landscapes with expensive, inefficient, and ugly wind and solar farms. They have crippled the automobile, forestry, atomic, hydroelectric, and mining industries, and destroyed the labor marketplace, while not putting so much as a dent in air or water pollution.
Their programs have driven global industrial, governmental, and personal debt to very near universal bankruptcy.
"Ivar heals horses by praying over them and builds a pond as a haven for migrating birds and forms conjectures about bird-speech."
I would like to make a career of forming conjectures about bird-speech, though it would be important that such conjectures are never actually pursued far enough to determine whether or not they are factually correct.
Reading this left me wishing for a healthy living landscape rather than the ominously life-devoid world we inhabit today. The Bronx in the 1970s it was practically a tropical jungle compared to any place I've seen in 30 years. We had fireflies by the thousands, swarms of sparrows and pigeons and blue jays you could call down with some bird seed or pieces of bread, praying mantises, monarchs, black swallowtails, yellow swallowtails, green garter snakes, striped garter snakes, cardinals, robin red-breasts, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bumble bees, yellowjackets, white moths and on and on. I mean, this wasn't some rural sanctuary, you could watch New York City's graffiti-covered elevated trains roar by overhead as all this was going on.
No one talks about this, but I tell all you young whippersnappers: Earth was once bursting with life in a way it no longer is.
I often think of that quote by Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki:
“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”
About a month ago my cat captured a fledgling blue jay. I got it away from her unharmed and it was able to fly away. The next day I was outside reading and a mature blue jay landed close by, looked me straight in the eye and started yelling — I know this sounds crazy but nothing like that had ever happened before. I apologized and told her I was keeping the cat inside and her children were safe. She flew off and they’re back to ignoring me.
Arundhati Roy has finally, formally been targeted for imminent political imprisonment. Let this be a lesson to any mouthy artist/activist who won't get with the authoritarian program. Empathy is over, and your Booker Prize, celebrated literary prowess, and sense of humor don't give you license to tell the truth about anything:
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/booker-prize-winning-author-arundhati-roy-to-be-prosecuted-in-india-for-kashmir-comments-13153545
Have been watching the goings-on at the bleeding edge of Machine culture and noting some significant things. First, there were murmurings a few years back of trying to impose a ban on AI for military use in things like battlefield drones and robots, but those quaint notions from a bygone era before World War III became so sexy have been thrown aside in favor of a full-on AI and robotics arms race. Chinese robodogs can now reliably put a bullet into your eyeball 98 percent of the time, exceeding human marksmen:
https://youtu.be/tLA6zAGKciA?feature=shared
The US, meanwhile, is planning to overwhelm any Chinese attempt to retake Taiwan with a "hellscape" of swarms of nightmarish AI-driven creatures emerging from the sea to kill as many Chinese as possible. The US has long been world leader in the creation of nightmarish hellscapes so underestimate it at your peril:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/top-us-commander-outlines-hellscape-response-if-china-invades-taiwan/ar-BB1nXHHQ
AI itself is quickly disappearing into the spooky realms of the "security state" and increasingly looks like it will be allowed only to bleed jobs from the last remnants of the working class, but slowly enough to indefinitely defray calls for UBI or other measures that might serve to make life less precarious and miserable for humans trying and failing to out-compete intelligent machines:
https://fortune.com/2024/06/14/edward-snowden-eviscerates-openai-paul-nakasone-board-directors-decision/
Overall, and despite the glossy AI/robotics cutting-edge patina, the Machine wants what it has always wanted: power, control, money, and war without end. And now that the "intelligent robots" have at last arrived, no puny humans will be allowed to get in the way of that agenda any longer.
AI is being used extensively by Israel in the war on Gaza to identify targets.
Yes, I'd call that a very early use of AI by Israel to eliminate "targets". Targets, I expect, will in years ahead expand to include anyone, anywhere, be they idealistic American college kids, South African anti-Apartheid activists, or instinctively colonialism-averse Irish people, who even know what the word "genocide" means.
Had a friend back in the day who worked for a spooky MIC corporation. He told me one time of how he'd gone to visit one of their subsidiaries out on Long Island as part of some project. And how it struck him that everyone in the vast building was wearing a yarmulke. So when Israel says Ireland will suffer "severe consequences" for displaying empathy for Palestinians (or for merely acknowledging such a thing as "Palestinians" exist), well, dollars to donuts Irish people are going to die. Hope I'm wrong.
Hope you are wrong on this one. Asassinations have been ongoing a long while but this stuff costs and provides diminishing returns and new vulnerabilities for the complicit imperium.
Nice! 😊This latest intelligent stuff likely speeds things up, but what is left after a crash into the buffers? Apparently the first iteration demands giganticism to pay for itself, includes Orwellian propaganda bubbles, and will demand incredible electricity (and copper), and unlimited very very good batteries. Climate (Paul's aside this month) will do its increasingly dramatic thing. Insects, or rather lack of them, or even the 'forever chemicals' might have a say? I will be long gone but admit to keep squinting at the cold blob in the N Atlantic charts and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf bothering over the calculations for AMOC.
Paul Beckwith (my go-to for the latest climate collapse trends) had a long one on the AMOC this week:
https://youtu.be/Qs2raUqUmsQ?feature=shared
Ireland seems likely over the next couple of decades to be survivable but perhaps will see high and low temps here that have not been experienced in God knows how long. I suspect Ireland will be okay(ish) but not immune to broader "global weirding". It's going to be a bumpy ride but I'd rather be here than on the American East Coast or a place like Phoenix, AZ. 🥵
Hope you are right on this one; nowhere sensible to migrate to these days. Not the first civilisation to get into such a fix, but the first to have gone seriously global and to have triggered a new geological epoch, with the natural mass extinction to go with it.
I am on the bigger island at your back and too old to matter, but still ponder the 'mechanisms'. Didn't Paul start off his series with 'Black Ships'? And I was reminded the other day by British journalist Ed Conway ('Material World') of the forced 19thC closure of the sub-continent's salt industry, that the late M. Ghandi went on about.
An equally sinister development of AI is the potential destruction of the Artist and creativity in society. You can go to https://udioai.ai/ and create your own music now. No need for anyone to write and perform the songs. Same with Hollyweird and movies and who knows...perhaps someday no need for people to write novels
In the future robots will be famous to 15 people. My own kids are in the economic crosshairs of this phenomenon (son an artist, daughter a serious filmmaker). I actually find those toys to be lots of fun to play around with, and don't actually see them as a threat to artists because there is almost no art produced in the United States at all anyway, defining art as works made for the love of it versus for the money.
When was the last time Hollywood produced any art? The early 1970s? And even then it was only clueless producers throwing money at things they didn't understand before the money men reasserted control and it's been shlock-by-committee ever since.
The other thing is, AI is precluded from producing human art no matter how well they fake it. Even if they became sentient they are not having human experiences so what value could their art have to humans? None. For corporations, who are similarly precluded from understanding human art, of course they can and will use it for cost-cutting the shlock they produce anywhere, any way, anyhow they can.
Novels, again that is so gate-kept by a liberal publishing priesthood I don't care if that industry burns to the ground. Art, like religion, can be damaged by the demands of commerce but not ultimately destroyed by it.
It seems that the only meaningful question answered by Generative AI is "How can money and power be concentrated even further upward?" In the meantime, many are getting caught up in the appeal of a shiny new thing and/or expected to bow before the electronic golden calf.
I'm still holding out a last hope it turns out to be as dangerous as they claim and explodes in their faces. That said, it is surely trending fast in the direction you claim. So reading the tea leaves today I'd say we are likely looking at an infinitely stable dictatorship run by the same American psychopaths who brought us Ukraine and Gaza.
It'll be either that, or an infinitely stable Chinese dictatorship. Really, the only difference will be which things you are not allowed to criticize under pain of death by robo-pooch.
Couple of AI doomer classics:
Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world:
https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c?feature=shared
Leopold Aschenbrenner - 2027 AGI, China/US Super-Intelligence Race, & The Return of History:
https://youtu.be/zdbVtZIn9IM?feature=shared
Thanks for the links!
I just got back from Dublin (happy late Bloomsday) and I was thrilled by the rain and cool weather. But I live in Denver where it's been 99 F and high ozone warnings so....
Climate change is happening, as it always did. We are currently in a grand solar minimum, which may explain the unusually cold weather. People falling over in the heat at sporting events is hardly a new phenomenon. The green agenda is a depopulation agenda which is profoundly anti human.
🤣
QED
Thank you--yes--would be weird if the climate, like a machine, stayed the same.
We have where I live on the Eastern Seaboard in the US weather manipulation which is superimposed upon normal climate change.
Now we see day after day of the same weather-- which has happened historically exactly never.
I celebrated Father’s Day on Sunday by bringing my children to Divine Liturgy for their first time. It was wonderful to be there with them, and I appreciate any suggestions from Abbey readers on encouraging family to join you at the Orthodox Church when their only church experience otherwise is with the generic evangelical Protestant churches that dominate the U.S. these days.
That is simply wonderful, Graham! How old are your children? I’m cradle orthodox and so my kids started coming to church from the time they were 40 days old (that is in the tradition of when Jesus was presented at the temple and so orthodox moms stay home the first 40 days and then bring the baby to liturgy to be “churched”). If they are adults or older teens, I would encourage just letting the liturgy do its thing on them. Sometimes I think we overwhelm people with church history and doctrine as opposed to them just experiencing the beauty that is an orthodox liturgy. It is meant to engage all of the senses. I would be upfront with them, though about how much it does mean to you because that in of itself might encourage them to continue to attend.
Thanks Amy! They’re all between 10-13 years old. I thanked them for coming with me and told them how much it meant to have them there. Otherwise, I answered what questions I could and just let them experience liturgy. Glad to hear my instincts about it were right!
I'm curious why the most benign liberal places become or are be coming totalitarian .. Canada, Australia. Maybe the US has a chance because we are much less conformist or more disagreeable in general? I hope so.. Any thoughts?
I think it was Jung that pointed out the higher the culture the deeper the shadow...this in reference to Germany prior to Nazism. German culture produced Beethoven,Brahms,Goethe , Schiller...and Auswitch.
Canada has MAID.....
I recall Chris Hedges once claiming that in the West you first get Huxley and only then, if you can't be bought off by the hedonic pleasures on offer, you get Orwell. It's a little like that Frank Zappa quote:
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Basically, energy is getting expensive, the quality of the land-base is running down, decades of neoliberalism has gutted industry in favor of games with finance capitalism, and the BRICS+ nations are exposing the West as in radical decline. Nations like the UK and USA are oligarchies that don't even make much pretense of having representative governments serving ordinary people, and the rest trail along (increasingly nervously) in the wake of the US imperium.
So I view it more as the mask falling away and exposing what was there all along.
'The society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally' Christopher Dawson
This seems to be the crux of the matter....While the left is very secular and powerful there is an interest in Christianity bubbling beneath the surface.....away from the centers of power for sure but evident to any who have eyes to see..
Send some of that Irish weather my way. I'm in one of those corners of the US currently being fried, after having had quite tolerable temperatures so far this month.
Got up early and drove to a quiet, undeveloped lake west of town this morning to paddle my kayak, listen to the woods wake up, and hopefully catch a bass or two. Pulled up to the landing and saw I left my life vest at home, which make going out not only (very slightly) risky but illegal. The odds of a CO coming along and writng me a ticket were low, but I didn't want to chance it. Drove back home, got my vest, and headed to a reservoir about 2 miles away where I paddled my kayak, listened to the Machine wake up, and had my flies pestered by fish too small to eat them.
I'm fortunately not staring down robot armies, though AI has been giving me some fits in the summer class I'm teaching. Looking back over the last year and a half, I think few students are using it to create writing better than they could produce on their own. A lot don't want to use it at all. But a few in my current class seem to be addicted to ChatGPT and their submissions barely resemble what was assigned. And they appear oblivious to that divergence. I fear I'll be dealing with similar cases quite a bit in the year ahead.
I am looking forward to the upcoming discussion of Everyday Saints though, which I've gotten most of the way through.
It's good to have this perspective!
I find that very interesting that going out without a life vest is illegal.
In relation to your comment, I can tell you that France was governed during the lockdown by the government's intimidation with its emergency measures threatening the citizens with fines if they left the house, and the intimidation was very successful, on the whole. Nobody wanted to fork out 130 euros or so if he or she were caught outside without a GOOD REASON. Not a shot fired. (I am not a great fan of guns, but still.)
The next time somebody gets rabid about the evils of capitalism in the oligarchy, maybe we could talk about the evils of capitalism outside of the oligarchy ?
In early lockdown, our governor forbade people who didn't share a house to sit together in a boat. But the life vest rule makes sense since, especially in summer, a lot of people who have little familiarity with boats or waterways will take to the water and find it can be surprisingly easy to get in trouble after a small change in weather or some careless maneuvering. As can more experienced boaters, for that matter.
There is an Icelandic author whom I like, whose name is Jon Kalmann Stefansson. In his trilogy of which the first book has been translated into English as "Between heaven and hell", but in French, as "Between the sky and the earth", there is a passage where in the early twentieth century, a fisherman on one of the small boats gets distracted thinking about Milton's "Paradise Lost", and goes out on his service without his slicker, and this... distraction costs him his life, as a storm brews up and he freezes to death for lack of that slicker. You might enjoy Stefansson as an author, because he is writing about the difference in worlds between one where the government puts up signs and fines you to discourage you from engaging in behavior that ENGAGES YOUR LIFE and possible death, and a government which does not put up electronic signs above its highways with "everybody vaccinated, everybody protected". I think that you could make a case for saying that a government which does not fine, and put up those signs is one in which the wild(s) has a bigger place than the other.
Maybe I would have died ages ago in a.. wilder place, who knows ? Maybe most of us would (have).
The art of being a creature...
To some of the people around me, the idea of being a creature is repulsive. It is synonym for not being in control of your choices, and who you want to be/become. Not being in control of your... identity.
To me, the idea of being a creature goes with the idea of being born. In Latin, the word "nature" is in relation to "natus", to be born. The very structure of "to be born" is that of a... passive, and that is what is most repugnant to many people. But it is possible that the "pass" of "pass-ive" is in relation to "pass-us", which in the Credo, seems to mean "to die". It is also in relation to the idea of suffering. And the word "PASt" suggests something that is behind, and not out in front. Just like all those... dead people are behind us, in a way. What is born is subjected to birth and to death.
I notice that there is no symmetry between "to be born" and "to die". "To be born" is a passive form, whereas "to die" is not.
Years of mulling this over in my time have convinced me that all this is very important to the way we construct our reality.
The word "creature" bears the mark of the Latin passive form, "to be created". It is also called... the SUPINE, and everybody knows that what is supine is lying down, and not standing up with a sword, for example, READY FOR ACTION, and for a fight.
Obviously, the passive form is also associated with the feminine aspect of existence, as in.. being created, and not creating oneself.
...
Over here in France, lots of people are very nervous about the Assembly/parlement being dissolved. A lot of people over here are very convinced that they know exactly what "fascism" is, and that THEY ARE RIGHT (whether they are on the "right" or not).
They seem unable to take into account the way the political spectrum has shifted recently, and the lines between "right" and "left" have become terribly blurred. They need... to feel safe in the idea that their beliefs are the Right Ones.
Probably lots of people felt this way before WW2...
History tends to repeat itself, but not "à l'identique".
Being a creature, a cre-a-ture, means there is a creator - what joy! At least that’s how I see it. William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
Jesus made the Way (himself) so we can have this joy in the here and now through the gift of the Holy Spirit!
On climate change….i am not a denier by any means. I remember sleepless nights on the second floor of our modest cape cod house when I was a child with an electric fan blowing directly on me. Our summers now are about ten degrees hotter than those and I cannot imagine what we would do without air conditioning. Probably all sleep on the screen porch or in the one room which is larger, cooler, with high ceilings, shade, and a lower threshold. At least we have windows. Houses today are not built to take advantage of any natural cooling, low ceilings, few windows, no cross ventilation, built by the thousands in former corn fields without shade of any kind.
What I am angry about in climate activism is its stupidity. We are not going to generate enough power to store billions of social media photos and power the grid as well as charge electric vehicles which are not really practical in a large country like the US with huge open distances in the heartlands, with solar and windmills. Nor is a planet covered in fragile glass panels whose very construction adds to the burdens extraction puts on people and places, and huge wind turbines along beautiful coastline appealing. It is a massive destruction of the environment for limited gains. We are running far ahead of ourselves, consuming more electricity everyday while shunning the only currently available real solution to electric generation- nuclear.
I am not at all knowledgeable about this subject, but that the rhetoric about climate change is devoid of both realistic solutions and an acknowledgment of how little technology is actually impacting it. It seems to me that once huge geological forces are in a period of instability it is the height of hubris to assume we can affect them, especially while not acknowledging the burden the internet has put on the grid. We are crippling economies in the name of net zero while acting as if Prometheus is around the corner with a new solution to our energy needs. It would be silly if it wasn’t so dangerous.
A cartoon I saw recently of a man running a gasoline generator to charge his electric car really did say it all. Here we still burn coal to generate electricity. How is this better than nuclear power?
There was the case of a young documentary filmmaker who had gotten a lot of attention for her first film, about environmental damage to the oceans. She was celebrated, won awards, and then she made a terrible mistake. Her mistake was thinking telling the truth was why her art was popular.
In her second film, she made your point, that what Paul would call "neo-environmentalism" was actually no solution at all. That film was essentially frozen out of the conversation and buried. She was threatening exposure of "renewable energy" as just a money-spinning scam rather than any sort of real solution (to a very real problem). The only "solution" would be some critical mass of people opting not to live such energy-intensive lifestyles, which appears a sort of pipedream.
Julia Barnes: 'Bright Green Lies' trailer:
https://youtu.be/iMJFQmBW4RE?feature=shared
Thank you. This is exactly the point, we have become so much more consumptive because of the internet, the ease of online shopping putting thousands of trucks on residential roads, devices and data storage, because of the needs of the machine for us to continually escalate consumption, when returning to earlier patterns of less consumption would directly benefit the environment.
It’s always frightening when you directly confront the heavy censorship we are subject to.
My take on this, which got me into trouble with my erstwhile green colleagues when I was running Dark Mountain, is both that the climate is obviously changing as a result of the industrial revolution and its consequences, and, as you say, that the proposed 'solutions' will do little or nothing to tackle this. The problem is the existence of industrial society, and nobody wants to look that one in the face.
The number of current major problems that cannot be ameliorated ( few could be solved) because the powers that be refuse to look them in the face is getting bigger.
I live in north Texas, where a lot of these windmills are being put up. The land mass taken up by these things is insane. I've never been a fan of the green energy push (well, I don't trust the people usually pushing it), but these windmills always seemed extra tragic to me. Paul actually put it best when he said something to the effect of "there is something seriously wrong when the supposed 'nature lovers' want to put a bunch of loud, giant, spinning towers on every open hillside." I've had a lot of success making people stop and think with that line.
There's a large cross built beside the highway in Groom, Texas. If it wasn't for the wind farms that now surround it, it would be the tallest thing on the landscape there. Quite symbolic.
If it's at all possible to ask this question without immediately attracting fierce disagreement... What is the actual situation with the ol' climate change?
My general view has always been that (a) the climate has always varied, and therefore (b) it's quite possible that we are coming out of a mini-Ice Age rather than experiencing a heating-up as such, (c) nobody truly knows how much effect emissions etc. have on this process, and (d) even if we were sure that e.g. carbon emissions were making things worse, the fact that China and other places intend to burn fossil fuels into the foreseeable future makes any real mitigation impossible. The whole Net Zero thing is therefore a silly, misguided effort to achieve the impossible. The huge amount of research by climatologists is not a conspiracy in the silly sense but there is lots of research funding to be had for those who accept the general climate change consensus and precious little for those who want to reject it, so it seems entirely possible that the scientific consensus (if there even is one) is way off.
Now, I also think though that pollution is nasty, trees are good, roads are bad, the small and local beats the big and industrial and all that stuff (I'm a subscriber here, after all!) and I would be heartily in favour of lots of sensible measures that would make things cleaner and greener and more sustainable. I just feel that whenever people mention climate change as such I need to count my spoons.
What am I to think?
I really do think this is a real problem that a lot of capitalist hustlers have rushed in to provide faux-solutions for.
So if it had to be broken down to a simple political binary:
- The "left" are correct that climate change is real, and are wrong/lying that it can be fixed with so-called "renewables".
- The "right" are correct that climate change is being used for money-spinning and to get political agendas pushed through, and wrong/lying that it's not a real/serious problem.
The actual situation is we are, as Paul said, hiding from the reality and living as if this is hopefully not happening/not going to affect us (much).
I view the problem of climate change as in every way a symptom of modernity. It's what psychologists apparently call a 'wicked problem'. That is to say, a massively complex thing that us normies can't begin to understand, and which has no easy or obvious 'solution' - if it has one at all, which it probably doesn't.
I can't see any reason myself to deny the science behind the enhanced greenhouse effect, which in principle even I can understand. The problem, fairly obviously, is industrial modernity. We depend for our very existence on digging up and burning vast reservoirs of ancient sunlight, and that process is wrecking the planet. Or perhaps, rather than 'wrecking' it, it is simply shifting it into a new state - something that's happened many times before, of course. But this state may not be conducive to human civilisation, or even human life.
It's almost as if we were meant to live humbly, in communion with nature, and that trying to break free of that instruction has ballsed everything up ...
I suppose the trouble is that I don't have any way of knowing for myself whether the scientists' account of these things is true, and I am a bit sceptical by nature, so I feel just as minded to be wary of their claims as I was of e.g. the more extreme claims about Covid-19's virulence and the measures needed to contain it. I suppose I trust scientific claims less and less the more closely they relate to government policy.
Scientific data is meant to derive its authority from the fact that experiments can be replicated and their results verified, but this is only true for the small proportion of people who have the ability to verify the data. The rest of us have to take scientific claims on authority, just as we take historical claims or religious claims on authority, and I suppose I consider the scientific/governmental double-act to be rather lacking in credibility. Not because they are all necessarily trying to deceive people, but because it has all become such a huge extravaganza (and the underlying problem is perhaps so "wicked") that there are any number of perverse incentives and vested interests in operation. Perhaps it's silly but I could just as easily believe it all to be a mistake as believe any specific prediction about our future climate.
But I suppose we all have to believe someone in these matters, and to believe that nothing is in fact happening is simply to trust someone else instead.
Global average temperatures track, in a boringly predictable way, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And it's easy to get the historical ppm of CO2 from things like ice cores.
In that sense, it's only confusing to people eager to confuse themselves. Sort of like looking at a chest X-ray the doctor is showing you of your tumor-filled lungs and telling him, "well, so much of my lung capacity is still tumor-free, I don't think this is a real problem..."
Where would I be able to see the kind of information you refer to, please? The term "historical ppm of CO2" is already a little beyond me so I would have to take it slowly!
The best-informed person I actually know is my sister, who studied archeology and covered a lot about different climactic periods as part of that. She seems quite ambivalent about it all herself - very keen on obvious environment stuff like clean water and recycling but agnostic about man-made climate change as such.
The graph in this document shows the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature change across time. You'll notice the graphs overlay one another in an almost identical fashion:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/8%20-%20Temperature%20Change%20and%20Carbon%20Dioxide%20Change%20-%20FINAL%20OCT%202021.pdf
Personally, I've moved on from this sort of staid document to borderline catastrophist updates at places like the below. That's just me though, as I like to stay ahead of the curve with my dire predictions and I have an absurdist sense of humor about this culture's tragicomic stumble to the boneyard:
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
You might want to consider picking up something like James Hanson's 'Storms of My Grandchildren' for more of the basics.
Covid has holed below the waterline any trust in 'establishment' authorities for many people, including me. In terms of climate change, however, you would have to ask what incentive there would be for thousands of scientists in dozens of fields over many decades to lie. Or what likelihood there is of them all being wrong. As Optera says below, the basics are pretty clear even to us non-specialists. Also, we can see with our own eyes the obvious change in temperatures and weather patterns. All that being true, I would have to have a good reason to listen to the dissidents, and so far I haven't seen it. Still, I'm not at all in favour of shutting down the conversation.
I don't think there is any incentive for these people to lie, as such. But I work in university research and I see some of the sausages being made, and it seems to be that there would be enormous obstacles facing a researcher who wanted to call any key element of the consensus into question. Researchers have to go where the money is if they want to have a career, and while that doesn't require dishonesty I think it does tend to mean working within the existing consensus most of the time. Once a scientific consensus becomes the locus of huge government subsidy and media attention I think it's likely to be very hard for anyone to correct it, at least in the short to medium term.
You need to realize this works in the other direction as well. Many scientists feel and display enormous reticence to call an emergency an emergency, so there has been and continues to be massive pressure to not induce panic by, well, telling the truth about how hosed we are. So much so that it's become a joke:
https://www.fasterthanexpected.com/
well said! One thing the whole covid shitshow did for me is cured me of caring if I'm cowed and sneered at for:
1)not buying the narrative
2)listening to "non-approved" theories and considering them...something we are expressly NOT ALLOWED TO DO
The punishment for failure to buy narrative &exclude outside theories is:
First derision then rejection from the Machine run System.
If you can handle that--then you're a little closer to freedom
“Live humbly, in communion with nature” Yep! It says in Genesis that Adam was placed in Eden to “dress and keep it” The Hebrew for that phrase could also be rendered “to serve and observe closely” An author I respect has written about the post fossil fuels future, John Michael Greer. This future will be upon us certainly a century from now or earlier. Dreams of wind , solar, tidal , fusion, nuclear energy will not enable a business as usual industrial future. Greer projects in his books The Retro Future, The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent, what will happen (not happy however). I think with applied wisdom and love the earth has the ability to support the REAL needs of even our current population, but that applied wisdom and love and the needed re-engineering is not coming our way and circumstances will cruelly force unpleasant change instead.
Maybe this is one “problem” that we don’t need to put onto modernity?
Worth a listen on this topic:
Long term trends:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tom-nelson/id1636340139?i=1000635475567
Interesting info on volcanic activity:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tom-nelson/id1636340139?i=1000637328019
Worth a regular read (available on this platform): Roger Pilke Jr
Obviously the climate has shifted endlessly throughout human history. Nobody suggests otherwise. This time around however, we are the volcanoes. And given the massive and very rapid temperature shifts that such things have precipitated in the past, we had better hold tight.
Agreed! I don't think humans can change the climate. It seems they can change the weather though. Remember the London Fog? Caused by coal burning.
One of the Medieval European plagues was said to have been caused by ash, from a volcano, settling over central Europe during the growing season. Crops failed, livestock starved, then people got weak and sick.
It wasn't the rats running 90 miles an hour from one town to the next with their biting fleas. This is known due to the impeccable records kept by local towns of the outbreaks and when they occurred.
Ash--or anything in large amounts, coal smoke, aluminum, you name it, manmade or not, can affect the weather.
If they can change the weather then why, on a larger scale (and what we're doing is very large scale) could they not change the climate too?
This is where I reveal my cards--I don't know, actually.
But now I wonder if anyone knows. I hate, like anyone else, to see pollution, waste, dumping and poisoning. But the climate change people seem less concerned with that and more focused on curbing human activities like travel, eating meat, having babies.
I am leery of the word climate and the word science, at least how they are bandied about these days.
Well, none of us can know because we have no expertise in the area. Can smoking cause lung cancer? I don't know, personally, and have no way of finding out. But the experts in the field have concluded after decades of study that it can, and this is one reason I don't smoke.
It's worth asking whather 'the climate change people' are actually trying to curb human activites, or instead trying to curb *excess* human activities. It's a matter of limits. Is it a 'human activity' to fly across the planet for a meeting - or to spend all day on the Internet? These things have not existed for 99% of human history. Just because we like them or have got used to them, it doesn't mean we have some kind of right to them, or that they're not damaging.
From where I'm sitting, I have to say, most of the rhetoric denying climate change sounds like toddlers screaming because they're not allowed any more ice cream. I'm not referring to you here, by the way. But that's how it seems.
I think they’re trying to curb excess humans.
Yes 100% have to do more on the ground level—our waterways with pharma products, plastics, aluminum…that damage is real and ongoing.
But, with the word climate, I see an ideology— like a trojan horse in which an opportunistic parasite can use to destroy “ the flesh it feeds on” (Although a proper parasite wouldn’t go that far).
My problem is I don’t trust the narrative and I now give zero f’s about appearing compliant to it.
Somewhere I heard that the power of the sun is so magnificent, so huge, so ridiculously glorious, that no human act can outweigh its sunniness.
It still runs the earth show.
Well, we can believe what we want. Nature will do what it is doing, in response to our abuses of it.
And you are being compliant to a narrative, even if you don't realise it. That's why all of your arguments are familiar, as is the language they are couched in.
Incidentally, fewer humans on the planet - a trend which is occuring entirely naturally as we choose to have fewer children - would be a good thing in my view. Again, you're assuming that the current state of play is normal, when it;'s anything but. When my grandad was born, there were two billion people on Earth. That was already double what his grandparents had experienced. There are now eight billion. The increase is unprecedented and doesn't benefit either humans or the rest of life on Earth. The coming natural decline seems like good news to me.
Looking forward very much to the retrospective, Paul. It seems like the Christian East would carry one along a path in which one could see Jeffers' Dark Mountain, Moses' Dark Mountain, and Yeshua's Bright Mountain as one and the same mountain--very much the sacred mountain, the high place, which we need to find as our center of gravity again in these times...
A nice thought, Graham, but not the same mountain. Moses’ could be touched and was feared, as in the law of sin and death. Yeshua’s can be lived and embraced with joy, as in the law of the spirit of life. Sorry, but think it’s an important distinction.
I enjoyed the Huxley talk - impressed by the interest from the Estonian audience, and the standard of their English! I found Brave New World and interesting but not particularly well written book but also his Perennial Philosophy made an impact when young as well as his psychedelic experiences. Interesting that you have gone for a more orthodox (in both senses) kind of religion, rather than the hippy mysticism that was so common in the sixties, but has flowed into much New Age stuff now. Huxley was a pretty serious student and practitioner of Hindu philosophy - it might be worth exploring how that, rather than Christianity, may be more conducive to living with the Machine, rather than raging against it or escaping it?
For those who may be interested, I have published a review of Paul's novel, The Wake, over at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf, along with my own rambling thoughts about apocalypses.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/guest-review-the-wake-by-paul-kingsnorth?r=ck6wh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks, Paul, to the link to your talk on "Brave New World." Coincidently, my wife and just read it. She for the first time. Me ... well, I won't go into how long ago I read it. In any case, it has sparked numerous conversations between us on related topics, and we were both amazed at how prophetic Huxley was. Frighteningly prophectic, the more I think about it. I look forward to queuing up your talk for after dinner tonight. By the way, also unseasonably cold here in the Pacific Northwest. Our bees aren't particularly happy, and my shivering tomatoes mutter epithets at me every time I walk by them. On the other hand, this has been a great year for wild rhododendrons. Cheers.
Having lived in Northern Ireland for 4 years, I miss the 'summers' terribly. I'm in California (where I was also born and raised) now and temps north of 100F / 38C are not uncommon. I remember when it would get into the low 80/26 range in NI and people would start to panic and talk about a 'heat wave'. I guess, relatively speaking, it was, but it always made me chuckle. Enjoy your holiday!
Climate change is hard to deny, particularly for one who has lived more than seventy years. Technically, climate is simply weather conditions tracked for thirty or more years. Scientific tracking, one would expect, would account for hourly, daily, weekly, yearly, and longer time periods, as accurately, and honestly as possible. Unfortunately, the anti-human climate change religion that is attacking human progress today is not scientific in that way.
Their methodology has become bastardized by their Malthusian zeal. They are thus selective in their data collection to deliberately skew results in the direction of cooling or heating that supports whatever theory catches their fancy. For some time that has been a cataclysmic warming that MUST be acted upon to SAVE THE PLANET.
They are supporting changes that are shortsightedly causing ecologic, economic, medical, social, and political devastation. They are doing so while seeing and portraying themselves as angels of mercy while bullying anyone who dares to question their findings and policies. They are destroying our forests and polluting our landscapes with expensive, inefficient, and ugly wind and solar farms. They have crippled the automobile, forestry, atomic, hydroelectric, and mining industries, and destroyed the labor marketplace, while not putting so much as a dent in air or water pollution.
Their programs have driven global industrial, governmental, and personal debt to very near universal bankruptcy.