In a long, informative, and sobering article, Richard Heinberg describes the difficulty of trying to “solve” climate change when it is intertwined with so many other equally complex and daunting problems...
The polycrisis is a confluence of climate change with rising inequality, resource depletion, pollution, and the disappearance of wild nature, among other worsening dilemmas.
We can’t know what to do about climate change unless we understand this big picture. Once we do, we see that many things we might do to “solve” climate change will have their own damaging impacts.
For example, building renewable energy infrastructure or carbon removal technology at scale will require an enormous increase in energy usage and resource extraction. Further, many of the needed resources are in ecologically sensitive areas, or countries with a history of labor exploitation and steep income inequality.
Also, all this resource extraction, energy usage, and manufacturing will produce its own pollution and environmental degradation. So, we might reduce carbon emissions, but we will just worsen other aspects of the polycrisis — which are also significant threats to our human future.
The polycrisis impacts our capacity for climate response. Political polarization, driven in part by increasing economic inequality, makes it harder for nations to make the tough choices required to reduce emissions. And the accelerating depletion of mineral resources threatens the build-out of alternative energy infrastructure.
Altogether, this bigger picture leads to the conclusion that there is no techno-fix. If we wish to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we will have to live differently.
This is not Planet Earth as we found it. The world we’ve known all our lives is vanishing in front of our eyes.
Human civilization arose and flourished over the last 10,000 years based on the certainty of a stable, predictable climate which meant consistently reliable agriculture leading to century after century of growth and allowing huge, thriving cities.
But now we're seeing what happens when we pump a TRILLION tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in only a few decades, when we heat the oceans to levels never seen in human history, and when we threaten the survival of everything that makes our lives possible.
Storms, floods, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, war, famine, mass deaths… that’s the future in a rapidly warming world.
The past is gone. Continue to hope and work for the best, but prepare for the worst.
Right, with couple of toots already out it's time for an #introduction!
We're the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference: we're a small independently run annual event that specialises in short-form, written papers on how medievalisms and medieval societies are used in modern games and gaming.
If that sounds good, do follow us and read along as we post links to our papers! Boosts on this welcome so we can find interested people.
#OnThisDay, 4 Jun 1972, civil rights activist Angela Davis is acquitted in a trial over her alleged involvement in the 1970 Marin County Civic Centre attack.
Davis had been prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, after guns she owned were used in the attack. The all-white jury cleared her of all charges.
We want you to know the name Alice Ball. She was the first woman and first African American to earn a master’s degree in science from the College of Hawaii.
Ball remarkably developed a treatment for leprosy, but she passed away shortly after.
Arthur Dean, chair of the College of Hawaii’s chemistry department, took over the project, and renamed Ball’s method to the “Dean Method,” never crediting Ball for her work.
WHORE-MONGER. A man who keeps more than one mistress. A gentleman who kept a female friend, being styled a whore-monger by a parson, asked whether he had a cheese in his house; and being answered in the affirmative, said 'Pray, does that one cheese make you a cheese-monger?'
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
"There have been 19 presidential elections in my lifetime. In every one, the losing candidates accepted the results as lawful, with one exception: Donald Trump."
"“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, THREE DAYS after announcing his 2024 candidacy...
"About 6 weeks before Election Day in 2020, #Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power...
This time... half a year before #Election Day 2024 — and after more than a year of pushing the “election interference” line... Trump again placed conditions on his acceptance of election results.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview... “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
JAPANNED. Ordained. To be japanned; to enter into holy orders, to become a clergyman, to put on the black cloth: from the colour of the japan ware, which is black.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)