February 17, 2019

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Shades of Gray – Anthropogenic Climate Change as Proof of Human Godliness

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

Shades of gray from my toes to the vault of the Atlantic cathedral, I stand and wonder. In wonder.

Seventy-five percent of the world is sheathed in water. Of the rest, we inhabit only 10% or 90% (http://www.curiousmeerkat.co.uk/questions/much-land-earth-inhabited/). If you exclude our lit civilization, we are invisible of the surface – despite the myth that the Great Wall of China is visible from space (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/great-wall-from-moon/).

Our newly fire-wise ancestors began worshipping multiple goddesses, gods, and immaterials and keep at it even today, though with a more refined and decorous mien. Science became the god of the age, predicting the transformation of Humanity into a global, biocybernetic civilization of, oddly enough, immaterial minds (“the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.” [I recently witnessed the disappearance of my father’s mind from his body…]) linked together into a new, self-worshipping god.

Discarding God, we have transferred our affections to ourselves. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that we die – in car accidents, of cancer, even from previously conquered diseases like measles – we are a sad substitute for the eternal gods of yore. What could we find that would grant us god-like powers? We’ve extended our lives a paltry decade or two, we reached for the stars, stopped at the Moon, then went back to near-space, pretending that two drifting pieces of junk passed through the heliopause and (it was announced: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voyager-2-spacecraft-enters-interstellar-space/) and “into interstellar space” are a great accomplishment of Humanity…

We haven’t conquered world hunger, want, our population, the wasteful production of power (every form of power production has an ecological impact, no matter how green. Electric car batteries will be difficult if not impossible to recycle, windmills, and solar panels need…um…wind and sun…to create power. We still worry about creating some way to store the power we make. Science fiction writers assume fusion power while scientists tell us every decade that practical fusion power is only two decades away (https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/11/forever-20-years-away-will-we-ever-have-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor).

So how do we prove our divinity?

The only way we have so far discovered is that we have changed the climate of our homeworld to a degree that anthropogenic global warming is the sole reason we are having unprecedented: cold, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, floods, glacial/polar melts, and species extinction.

In fact, there are no other factors that have an effect on Earth but Humanity. Forget volcanoes, solar activity, El Nino, La Nina, the Polar Vortex, or our position in space – they don’t matter. Even so, from space, the profound changes in climate of the third planet of a minor star in an arm of an unremarkable barred spiral galaxy are without apparent cause, a sort of planetary spontaneous generation of climate change. Certainly there are sources of CO2, chlorofluorocarbons, H2SO4, and other odd chemicals that appear from nowhere.

*sigh*

Even the master of future building, Kim Stanley Robinson, flooded Earth in BLUE MARS with erupting volcanoes beneath Antarctica rather than anthropogenic global warming. I imagine he used catastrophe purely for dramatic effect as the extreme, story-driving effects of anthropogenic global warming are in the future twenty or so years. AGW – I prefer to call it what we started with rather than whatever the current name change as the philosophy of AGW remains the same. (It reminds me of the marketing of the fictional pharmaceutical company in BIG BANG THEORY, that Bernadette Wolowitz-Rostenkowski works for…)

Last point in the rant above: overpopulation, pollution, and AGW seem to me to miss the point by crying out that we “Save the Earth!” Earth is a planet which will be around until a massive impact event or it’s consumed by the expansion of an aging Sol into a red giant. It’s HUMANITY and several other lifeforms (though only the expansion will eliminate the cockroaches…) will disappear. It’s likely that anything short of that will leave some kind of life on Earth.

Please don’t get me wrong: I work to keep my carbon footprint as small as possible by recycling, buying locally, biking instead of driving, reusing and thrift-store shopping frequently, and using “environmentally safe” products. We all need to do what we can. We rescued our pets and if they weren’t, we neutered or spayed them; we strive with others against world hunger and disease and local hunger and disease prevention and work against teen pregnancies, and give to charities targeted at issues that are important to us; and our investment portfolio is as green as we can make it.

But in witness to the Human penchant for drama, I have only to nod toward Bollywood and Hollywood, and the latest best-sellers in electrons or on paper. The number of SF short stories set on post-climatic-apocalyptic Earth are abundant in electronic and paper magazines (though Rebecca Roanhorse’s TRAIL OF LIGHTNING has a delightfully different take on the subject, adding an engrossing immaterial angle.

I’d like to write like that myself and will be poking around at creating a slightly different world that has a slightly different immaterial view!


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