This is climate change, an existential threat

The Earth is heating, our climate is changing, and it is our responsibility to do something about it, to become the enlightened humans that life and providence require of us.

If you should take anything from this, from my digestion of the materials, it's that human activity is the cause of the warming; and although there is disagreement in science (by design --that's why science is good and useful), there isn't any meaningful disagreement about the fact that the Earth is heating, the heating is human-caused, and that something must be done.

So, what is global warming? What is climate change? How do we know that humanity is the cause, and why does that even matter?

To that end, do you ever wonder why it is that we don’t all freeze to death, each night, once the sun and its radiant energy appear to dip beneath the horizon?

Better yet, do you wonder how it is that we’re even here to witness a sunset at all; how, despite the near universally-inhospitable nature of the cosmos, life has not simply taken hold on Earth, but has, with time and sufficient material conditions, evolved complex forms to fill the sea, the sky, to cover the land in beautiful, invaluable, interdependent variation?

Consider our closest neighbour, the moon. Without an atmosphere, without liquid water, without its own carbon and water cycles to retain and redistribute energy received by the sun, the surface heats up, and then that energy just radiates back into space.

Consequently, and with no substantial gaseous medium to mix, to transport heat from one side to the other (the effect exaggerated by relatively long days and nights), the surface temperature can be as high as 127C in sunlight, and as low as -173C during the lunar night --totally inhospitable, bereft of life as we know it.

The Earth, however, has a substantial atmosphere, and is the living product of eons of geological evolution; millions of years of the sun’s rays interacting with the Earth’s 1. wet, 2. rocky, 3. organic/living surface, 4. its ice, 5. its gaseous atmosphere.

That interaction, and those five components, together, constitute the Earth’s climate system, and are what retain and redistribute energy received from the sun, self-regulating, balancing, recycling crucial elements principle to the system’s stable operation between the surface, ocean, and atmosphere via a myriad of complex interconnected relationships --giving us Earth, as Eden, our very own cosmic greenhouse, precious beyond imagining.

Shielded by its magnetosphere, Earth’s atmosphere consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen; the former being good for plants and life, and the latter, for human respiration and rocket fuel. There is also a fair bit of argon, a largely inert, noble gas; good for applications that require low-reactivity, like the inside of a filament-style light bulb.

Among the trace elements that comprise the rest of our gaseous sky are the greenhouse gasses (mainly carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapour), so-called for their ability 1. to be transparent to shortwave radiation from the sun (visible light), and 2. to be opaque to, and thus interact with longwave radiation (infrared light), the very form of energy which the planet’s surface emits when heated, and by which it can be heated further if something reflects or radiates that heat back to it. Spoiler alert, re: global warming.

When the sun, fusing hydrogen at its core, emits energy in all directions, and we see it shining so from the surface of Earth, we are seeing shortwave radiation penetrating the gasses held against our planet by its massive distortion of the fabric of spacetime (by the pull of gravity, we may say). Some of that incoming sunlight scatters-blue in the upper atmosphere, giving us a reprieve from the existential provocation of the bespeckled black beyond; and whatever isn’t reflected into space by the clouds, by white ice, by reflective particles in the air, et al, then imparts its energy onto the surface of the Earth, into the dark ocean, onto the asphalt, soil, sand, tree leaves, or soot settled across polar ice, previously white, heating it, melting the ice beneath.

Unlike with the moon, when the Earth’s sun-heated surface then releases that energy, the consequent longwave radiation isn’t simply lost to space. Instead, much of it interacts with the aforementioned greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere).

Those greenhouse gas molecules, so structured, absorb this incoming longwave radiation from Earth’s (sun-heated) cooling surface. This causes their molecules to increase in energy, and to then emit their own longwave radiation, either into space, into other molecules in the troposphere (heating it), or back to the surface, to heat it again (in addition to the heating which the sun continues to deliver), only for that heat to be emitted by the surface again --and so it is, back and forth, over and over, until the heat originally delivered by the sun as shortwave radiation is eventually radiated into space as longwave radiation.

The greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere act as a leaky one-way valve with respect to energy received by the Earth from the sun. With more energy entering the system than there is energy exiting the system (because the system is insulated by the greenhouse gasses), the total amount of energy within the system increases. It is as uncomplicated as flow in versus flow out.

That a planet’s sun-shone surface and lower atmosphere become warmer than they would have, were it not for the planet’s insulating atmosphere of sufficient composition (heat-trapping greenhouse gasses), we call the greenhouse effect.

As such, if/when a planet evolves life, and in the warmth of the greenhouse effect, that life then develops to such complexity and intelligence, such social and technological heights as to organize and produce and rigorously expand, refine, and utilize the fruits of civilization: language, industry, science, engineering, mathematics, iPhones, satellites, and a connected global community of scientists; and those scientists then observe and agree upon the reality of 1. an increase in the global average temperature, 2. an unprecedented and continued increase in surplus atmospheric CO2, as well as an increase in other greenhouse gases, and 3. the absence of higher solar output and/or orbital eccentricity to account for said heating, then we call this and its projected continuation, global warming.

And, it is in our understanding of global warming that we know the cause of the heating to be human activity. For, though the sun does go through solar cycles of increasing and decreasing energy output; and though the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes over long periods of time (Milankovitch cycles), predisposing the Earth to more or less solar radiation heating the surface, neither of these sources are presently configured to be heating the Earth. In fact, it is the opposite --if the climate were dictated by the sun alone, then, at the time of writing this, we would be expecting to see global cooling.

Rather than the upper atmosphere heating, as would be the case if the added warming was external to Earth, the upper atmosphere is actually cooling. And while the upper atmosphere cools, the lower atmosphere is warming, as one would expect to be the case if the heating was caused by heat energy being trapped between the sun-heated surface and the surface-heated lower atmosphere.

When all known variables are assembled into computer climate models, it is only with the inclusion of human CO2 emissions, and changes in land use that the observed heating can be explained.

Over the time coinciding with the rise of modern civilization, the sun hasn’t been getting appreciably closer or larger, nor has its solar output been intensifying, and yet, appropriate to the greenhouse exhaust of our global civilization, and how we use and affect our world (pollution, clearing forests for agricultural use, etc.), the planet has been getting warmer.

Moreover, contrary to what you may intuit, the CO2 exhausted by all the planet’s volcanoes is nothing compared to the amount released by modern civilization in a year.

To be sure, the plants, the ocean, and other terrestrial sinks into which atmospheric CO2 is drawn, have, for many thousands of years, cycled an amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere approximately equivalent to their own total annual exhalation into it. This relationship we call the carbon cycle.

When, however, you introduce a novel source of atmospheric CO2 (say, from buried carbon deposits in the form of fossil fuels), unless you also add a novel means of cycling that surplus out of the atmosphere, the surplus will grow.

Unlike the forests’ and the ocean’s CO2 exhalations which have their own CO2 uptake to balance, there is nothing to balance the CO2 humans are releasing, not at the scale that we do it. This is the heart of the issue.

Indeed, for as long as there is a release of CO2 that otherwise would --but for the actions of humans-- have remained out of the atmosphere, locked beneath the surface of the Earth, then the surplus of heat-trapping gasses in the lower atmosphere will continue to grow, along with the warming and consequences thereof.

Suffice to say, we know the planet is warming (and warming dangerously), we know the mechanism to be the greenhouse effect, and we know its cause: converting previously sequestered hydrocarbons into otherwise cheap and plentiful energy, the world over; and using this to construct, power, and fertilize ourselves from a population of one billion, two-hundred and twenty years ago, to seven and a half billion, and growing, today.

As such, if it is then determined that --with Earth’s climate system in mind-- 1. the ocean is warming, and acidifying from CO2 saturation; 2. polar ice which reflects the sun’s shortwave radiation, and provides temperature differentials sufficient to drive global energy circulation is melting more and more, returning less and less, each season; 3. the lower atmosphere is, without precedent, overfilled, and filling still, with heat-trapping greenhouse gasses; and 4. these and other effects of global warming stand to exacerbate difficulties for life on Earth, and to further destabilize the increasing dysfunction of the previously balanced climate system, such that it trends toward feedback loops and tipping points beyond which even the collective efforts of humanity become insufficient to influence the system one way or another, then we call this climate change, and we recognize it for the existential crisis that it is.

That is, if a planet heats up enough, and for long enough, the relative concentrations of the various chemical compound climate controls, and thus their relationships between one another can then become so unbalanced as to prevent the associated systems from functioning.

Ultimately departing from the stable configuration that long-favoured the evolution of humans and the subsequent rise of civilization, without timely intervention, the living body of the life-supporting Earth will become irreparably ill, and our real-life utopia will die.

In its place, a capricious, punishing climate will reign; and humans, with desperation and/or high technology (one hopes), will be forced but to cope --the conditions on Earth growing ever more hostile, inhospitable, and deeply unfair to the generations born after the loss of ice, after the appreciable thickening of the Earth’s greenhouse insulation, after the storms, floods, droughts exacerbate everything, after the fires, after the erosion, after the desertification, after the great diseases and displacement of peoples, after the wars over freshwater and arable land roll back centuries of social and technological progress.

And then, what? With sticks and stones, and relics of a previous age, humans will subsist on a planet now rendered unfit for human flourishing? Let’s not let it come to that.

Where global warming refers to the anthropogenic (human-caused), CO2 initiated warming of Earth’s climate system, climate change refers to global warming, as well as global warming’s effects.

Global warming is the warming of the planet, and climate change is what happens when said warming is let to warm without limit or end. This is a crucial distinction. It is the difference between fire heating a home from within the fireplace, and that fire taking over the entire room, forever damaging the structure which gave it form.

The accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gasses (re: global warming) is analogous to taking in salt to provide your body and its many organs, the myriad of cells and organelles which comprise these with sodium and the good and useful (necessary) effects of sodium within the body. Climate change is, to this analogy, like taking in such an excess of otherwise good and useful sodium, an amount above and beyond what your body could ever use in its healthy operation that you make yourself progressively ill.

If you are continuously poisoning yourself with sodium, and you do not get yourself timely medical intervention, you are going to die; that is, the various organs, cells, and biological systems that work together to keep you alive will cease to function as each of them require of each other. You will get more and more ill until even a desire to change and seek help is insufficient, because the damage to your body will have become too great.

In kind, if climate change is left to exacerbate beyond our control, this ultimately leads to a disruption in the climate system (heating planet, floods, worse storms), to ecosystems (mass extinction, disease, heatwaves and droughts), to individual human lives (suffering, poverty, inequity), to the social fabric (lack of education, stability, confidence in governing bodies), to world politics (strained tensions, scarce resources, war), and to countless natural systems that worked perfectly fine up until highest form of life on Earth went on to build worldwide arrays of concrete cities, a global industrial civilization fueled by sequestered carbon pulled from the surface and spent without due care for the long-term environmental repercussions.

Just as too much of a good thing is bad (even drinking too much water will kill you), too much uncontrolled heating of the climate system will cause what has hereto acted as the womb of all known life, of humankind, and of civilization to deform, to become less by the willful ignorance of the very intelligence born of it.

Disappointing your parents is pretty bad, but have you ever allowed the only known cosmic oasis of life and sentience to be ruined, and doing this only so that we may enjoy fast food and consumer electronics without also having to account for our continued complicit deleterious effect on this miraculous, beautiful, beautiful, impossibly-beautiful place?

The effects of unmitigated global warming are at once numerous, terrible, and perhaps not even fully understood. This will by no means be an exhaustive account of the consequences of our continued pollution and inaction, but, I’d like to think these worries should be sufficient to let you know that climate change is a serious problem, one that demands action.

The ice is melting.

As before mentioned, more atmospheric CO2 means warmer surface and troposphere temperatures. It also means that the ocean (a major element of the climate system through which CO2 is drawn from the atmosphere) absorbs more CO2, while also absorbing more energy from the heating air upon it.

With warming surface temperatures, and a warming ocean, the ocean water around the polar ice warms, and this weakens the edges of the ice, breaking it apart, allowing more of its surface area to be affected by the warming air and water around it, melting it.

When the ice recedes, the Earth’s surface becomes less reflective (less white ice), and thus becomes a better absorber of the sun’s visible light. As such, more of the sun’s energy is retained by the surface, heating the dark ocean, radiating that heat into the lower atmosphere, consequently melting more of the Earth’s ice, which in turn makes the planet even less reflective, heating the surface and lower atmosphere, warming the ocean further, melting more ice, and on, and on.

The ocean is acidifying.

One-third of all CO2 drawn from the atmosphere goes into the planet’s ocean. This covers the amount which the ocean releases, as well as some of the surplus poured into the sky by humans and other terrestrial sources. The ocean cannot continue at this rate, indefinitely, and beyond a certain point it won’t.

As the ocean warms, as it absorbs more CO2, it becomes increasingly acidic, threatening marine life which does not thrive in an ocean saturated with CO2. Consequently, the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere is progressively diminished, as too much excess CO2 has already dissolved into the ocean (it can only hold so much), and because marine life that would otherwise be using photosynthesis to draw CO2 from the atmosphere suffer the consequences of a warming, acidifying ocean.

Water vapour, the most potent of greenhouse gasses.

As air warms, it becomes better able to hold moisture; and water vapour (the gaseous state of water) produces a greater insulating effect than CO2, more than any other greenhouse gas.

As the ice continues to melt, as the water, land and air continue to warm, the ocean and wetlands will lose more of their mass via evaporation, adding water vapour to the troposphere, thus insulating the planet to a greater degree. The planet then warms, and in so warming, more and more surface water is added to the atmosphere, insulating it, further heating the lower atmosphere and surface.

Thaw of the permafrost, and the warming of the ocean deep.

In the polar regions, as the planet heats, as the ice is melted and replaced by dark, sunlight-absorbing surfaces like rock or ocean, the increase in local temperatures allow frozen soil (permafrost) containing massive stores of frozen methane to thaw, thus releasing these stores of methane into the troposphere, intensifying the greenhouse effect.

Likewise, as the ocean continues to warm, eventually, so too will the deep reaches of the ocean; just as the thaw of the surface permafrost releases worse greenhouse gasses than the CO2 which caused it, so too will the frozen hydrocarbons upon and beneath the ocean floor rise to meet the troposphere where they will be added to our growing surplus of greenhouse gasses, trapping more and more heat energy, warming the climate system, and therefore subjecting life to consequences of increasing severity.

Unmitigated feedback loops lead to tipping points, and tipping points eliminate choices.

If the Earth heats to the point of releasing a sufficient amount of these efficient, heat-trapping hydrocarbons from the permafrost and ocean floor, this could well represent a tipping point, whereafter, even if we all decided that climate change is real, and that we didn’t want it to ruin the future of our planet, the effect of the greenhouse gasses released by the aforementioned feedback loops would be enough to render human action (or inaction), however committed or ingenious, wholly trivial.

Effectively putting the brakes on climate change before it becomes too late is akin to trying to stop a car from rolling off the road before it leaves the mountainside --you have to act while the wheels are still on the road, while you still have control. Brakes and steering become useless in the air, and human ingenuity has little hope of success against a runaway greenhouse scenario, especially one driven by geology rather than the manageable human activity which precipitated it --human activity susceptible to human intervention.

To put it another way, you can snuff out the lit wick of a firecracker with your fingers, easily enough, but no matter how hard you try (and you won’t be trying more than once) (and do not try this) you will never be able to pinch so quick and firm as to snuff out the chemical reaction of the firecracker core once it has ignited, once it has begun to go ‘bang’. You stop the process before it runs away on you, or you don’t stop it at all. Climate change is no different.

Science is a tool that can make us ever more able, if we can manage to keep it.

While we do have promising innovations in green energy, in conservation, in the artificial sequestering of atmospheric CO2... all that wonderful high science, effective engineering, and future progress is entirely predicated upon at least the current state and abilities of a world not yet suffering the worst of climate change.

And so, the consequences of climate change (the effects of unmitigated global warming) are not limited to the effects on the climate system and its progressive dysfunction --there is also how climate change affects humans, and the other forms of life on Earth, as this will determine how, if at all, humans and other forms of life are able to adapt.

Water will rise, people will be displaced, and nobody will like this.

Water expands when it warms, occupying a larger volume than it would at a lower temperature. Further, as the polar regions continue to warm, as the floating ice melts, so too melts the ice sitting on land. When this land ice melts, the water it releases is added to the world ocean’s total amount of water. The result is that the height of the ocean will rise, and as it rises, it will flood coastlines and low-lying areas near thereto.

This might not be so bad, but for the fact that humans tend to live near water; and, near to our shores, modern humans have constructed massive and complex (and thus unlikely to be moved) water-treatment plants, power plants, and other key infrastructure which will be lost as the rising water advances, chasing the emigrating masses inland and elsewhere.

Disruption of the weather machines.

Because the Earth rotates on its axis at a tilt of 23.5 degrees, and is a spheroid, the sun’s rays of shortwave radiation do not strike the planet’s sun-facing surface uniformly. The equator receives direct shortwave radiation, where the poles receive more oblique rays.

With the ice-covered poles receiving less solar energy, and the ice-free equator receiving more concentrated solar energy, this temperature differential creates differences in pressure within the atmosphere; and, along with differences in temperature/density and salinity within the ocean, this drives the jet streams and ocean currents; circulating the system’s heat, water, air, giving rise to a stable climate, diverse biomes, habitats for life, conditions favourable to human civilization.

However, with the melting of the ice at the poles, if the air and water at the poles are warmed enough, and if the freshwater from the melting ice sufficiently dilutes the salinity of the ocean water, then this could stall these currents in the air and ocean which drive global circulation, and on which we depend for the warming of places in higher latitudes, and cooling those near the equator --to say nothing of the needs of a healthy, life-supporting ocean.

Floods, fires, erosion and the dust bowl.

Making matters worse (which ought to be the slogan for the future of climate change), as the air continues to warm, as it holds ever-more moisture (along with the stalling of the aforementioned currents dependent on global temperature differentials), this increases the frequency and severity of floods and droughts.

For, while the warming air holds more water, and thus can dump more water when it rains, this also means that it takes longer, after a rain, for the air to reach that extended point of saturation required for it to rain again.

Rather than more numerous small buckets taking such and such amount of time on average to fill, and then metering this water out in more numerous rains across a wider area, there are fewer larger buckets that deluge areas, and which then require more time to fill, leaving the areas not just deluged (as well as those just damaged by flood) with no precipitation for a while.

In the former example, a larger area gets a more healthy metering of water over time, and the forest, soil, crops, and animals enjoy this; and in the latter, with warmer air, with increased evaporation, and an even greater increase in the ability of the air to hold moisture, this means floods, weathering, and drought.

This drought, the drying out of vegetation and woodlands will lead to worse forest fires, more frequent fires, which, in turn, adds more CO2 to the atmosphere, insulating the climate system even more. The prevalence of these large fires also reduce the ability of forests and forest floors to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and (especially for coastal forests) their ability to efficiently transport much needed precipitation inland via evapotranspiration, further exacerbating drought, onto famine, onto strife, onto ‘hey, why didn’t we just address climate change while we still could?’ for as long as people can remember.

Moreover, all this warming air and water will cause storms and tropical cyclones to become more powerful, as they are driven by the rise of moist, warm air. Sadly, painfully, when rising ocean waters and heavier rains are compounded by stronger storm surges, the result is human suffering, and unsustainable material and financial damages for as long as people are willing to bear it.

With old growth succumbing to forest fires, and with increased winds and storms pulling at the remaining trees no longer shielded by their neighbours, more of the carbon-sequestering forest will fall, leading to further weathering of the forest floor, pulling away nutrients, killing trees that otherwise would hold firm and contribute to the health and wellbeing of the land.

This weathering, deforestation, and the repurposing of land (perhaps as migrating peoples repurpose lands for resources, habitation, industry, and agriculture) can lead to the desertification of regions.

By placing the immediate needs of the desperate over the long-term health of the land (which is understandable in that moment, re: desperation), previously fertile areas can be used and misused to the point of being made arid --ultimately bearing no fruit, a weathering away of the soil, into inhospitable desert.

This desertification will, in turn, like the rising waters, storms, drought, drive populations into areas already stressed by climate refugees, and by the difficulties of climate change atop the regular cultural, political, virologic, economic problems that only stand to be made worse, and more difficult to navigate under the inevitable pain which will follow our inaction.

Pandemics, parasites, and invasive species.

As the planet heats, animals, plants, and insects, their diseases and parasites will move into areas that were previously too cool for them.

And where will these exotic viruses and diseases find us and the other animals? They will find us suffering heat waves, droughts, storms, hungry and stressed, either displaced into a new land, or in such a position as to have climate refugees displaced into the places that we live --in either case, acutely vulnerable.

In summation of the consequences, re: what climate change will mean if we do not sufficiently address it while we still can --the Earth will continue to warm, the continued warming will significantly change the Earth’s climate system, affecting all the ecosystems and relationships which have depended on its prior stable configuration.

All the while, life will become progressively more difficult, and any human efforts to overcome or cope with the newfound limitations upon human potential will have to be done under the added difficulties, suffering, and cost of climate change --under what will eventually (if left untreated) become a terminally damaged climate system.

Climate change is real. This is happening. Check your sources.

The unknown, and then obscured, and now ignored or denied and/or misunderstood ecological debt accumulated by human activity can be paid in the present, with interest, or the opportunity to intervene can be allowed to come and go, after which there is no choice --there becomes only costly consequences, pitiless regret, and adapting to those consequences as best we can.

If we can choose to affect how this plays out, to guide our own future to a favourable outcome, then we should. This should not be a controversial position. It should be the natural view.

Just as we know it to be right and fair to ask that our cities and civilization not be destroyed with grand and terrible weapons of war, it is also right and good to ask that we not destroy the future prosperity and potential of all human and non-human life, alike, by ignoring our responsibility to our home, the Earth.

Unlike before we knew that it was wrong to pollute, unlike when it was still so easy to lie to us, today, a wealth of free, reputable information is available to most anyone with an internet connection and the wherewithal and/or the luck to not begin down a path of misinformation, disinformation, and baseless conspiracy theories.

Climate change is not a hoax, nor is it a global conspiracy to rob the world’s nations of their sovereignty, nor is it an exaggeration, nor is it a distortion of the facts, nor is the science unsettled, nor would it be prudent to ‘wait it out and see what happens’, nor would it be preferable for us all to let the environment deteriorate for the benefit of the economy, nor is it already too late to do anything about it --and anyone who deals in these “alternative facts” either doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they do, and it’s unhelpful lies which they peddle, and you should reevaluate the good use of your trust in such sources, leaders, ideologies.

If modern climate change denial is good for anything, it’s a helpful way to understand who is intelligent and paying attention, and who merely denies climate science as a matter of politics. The former is worthy of your critical attention, and the latter, your critical disapprobation.

Of the honest, only the deceived and/or uninformed believe that it is wrong to act to care for the environment with at least the same grand effect and effort by which it is polluted.

Responsibility, and the soaring heights and meaningful sorrow of what we call the soul.

To reiterate, unless I have not made myself clear, not only can we do something about climate change, but our very nature compels us to --we must act to avert a future limited by the terminal damage of our climate system, our home.

It is our moral imperative as modern humans to protect the systems that support life and intelligent life, alike, on Earth, and anywhere life has found itself. Humans must be mindful of, and live as to promote the health and habitability of this place, for humanity, and for all life, together; and we must do this because humans are but a form of life, and of all the forms of life, only humans with their social minds and civilization can possibly evolve to possess the ability and intelligence to save themselves, and thus, to save the world of life and meaning.

Contrary to the ways of the cow, or the chicken, or the eel (so far as we know...), no form of life but humans may ever have the opportunity to try to deflect a comet, or to look back upon the Earth, from space, and to see ourselves for what we are.

If anyone is going to, it must be us who purposefully acts to maintain the biosphere of which we are part, and to decide based on observations of, and reasonings appropriate to our high science, that it is good and right and necessary to mature as a species, and to cherish our habitable planet and its fortuitous circumstances for the naturally-occurring, infinitely-beautiful miracle that it is. Full stop.

Who doesn’t love pie?

We must protect those places where life thrives, because of the responsibility outlined above, yes, and I would argue, too --among an infinite number of other valid reasons-- we must maintain civilization and life, because of the rare cosmic phenomenon of apple pie, and for the equally invaluable sentience and peace to enjoy it with a friend.

Unlike the mindless physics, unfeeling chemistry, the unthinking quantum mechanics that dominates the rest of the universe, on the Earth, today, at our scale of perspective, there exists apple pie and everything else that needs to exist for that to be so, everything that needs to have happened (whether difficult or immediately fortuitous), and needs to have evolved over the entire course of the history of the the universe for us to get to a point where the enriched guts of ancient supernovae have come to become arranged into such configurations as give rise to apple pie, to human mouths, human minds to taste it, human civilization, culture, to feeling individuals enjoying the company of each other, contemplating the nature of existence, and of beauty, and of the good, and everything, anything we wish.

What is it like to be a bat? I do not know, personally, but if the Earth is polluted and misused to the point of mass extinctions, and all the bats die, then the property of the universe of what it is to be a bat, too, will thenceforth, cease, along with what future forms may otherwise have come of the continued propagation and evolution of the form of the bat.

Similarly, if the conditions and systems of the Earth are damaged to the point of becoming markedly inhospitable to humans, and human civilization is then stressed to the point of war, collapse, and dissolution, then, so far as we know, to the universe, the peace to sit down with a friend is lost to the suffering and mere animal subsistence (if that) which lives on in the absence of our grand project.

What was once mere organic chemistry upon the early Earth is now the beautiful cornucopia of flora and fauna of this place, of human minds, and of everything which comes from culture, of connected human existence having endured through to the age of information.

In you, the universe is not simply the unfeeling material evolution of matter and energy; in you the universe thinks, considers itself from a limited perspective within itself. In you, the universe can experience, have emotions, goals, and the universe can work toward them. In you and everyone else, in civilization and all we have constructed on Earth with our high technology, our sciences, engineering, democracy, our empathy and hope, the universe can change the conditions of the planet, consciously, to help the many forms of itself flourish.

While we could --I say, rhetorically-- just collectively roll-over and die, hoping that around some other star, there exist a people who have found themselves in the midst of a miracle as improbable as our own, and that maybe they, with all they have experienced differently, can figure out how to evolve into enlightenment and responsibility, without also destroying their home or themselves.

Like, we could, but that’s obviously ridiculous, and terrible, and let’s not do that. Why should it be any easier for these hypothetical others to maintain for the universe a form of efficacy and intelligence and empathy? If it’s difficult for us to keep the peace on the planet, and to grow as a people, it is probably just as difficult for all life, everywhere, to overcome their evolutionary roots, to rise above their ancient animal constitution, and to become more, as the more within us knows is needed.

The future is ours alone to defend, and ours alone to lose.

We have only to responsibly, humbly, and in good faith overcome our assumptions about what is possible with respect to humans working together to achieve a common goal.

We must let our understanding of the facts inform ourselves on the science, as it evolves, and to support good and useful ideas and individuals such that we may manifest and promote desired means and ends with respect to human flourishing --where human flourishing explicitly includes the wellbeing of the Earth, of civilization, of the individual, of life and the systems natural and necessary for its healthy operation.

The sun already pours free energy into space without end (or, at least for the next ten billion years), and the winds and waters of the Earth heave with mechanical force and potential energy. With these, and with responsible nuclear power, advancements in energy storage, geothermal, and what fruit the future offers by way of fusion and other technologies, humans can and must transition away from our reliance on fossil fuels.

If we can do this, if we can know peace, if we can reduce our negative impact on the world, if we can mitigate enough of the damage, and if we can flourish with the rest of the life on the planet, in harmony, while venturing out into the stars, and doing so as to know joy, love, compassion, curiosity, connection, and our humanity, still, then we will have done in our lives, and as a species, I believe, what we were meant to do with the opportunities afforded us, the responsibilities entrusted in us by the very form of our nature.

Humans have evolved from the Earth, from and along-side the life living upon it. All the people that you see, all the animals, all the bugs, all the trees, microbes, everything that does, or will ever live on Earth, all of it is this same tree of life that writes these words with myself, the same cosmos that reads them in you, the same ‘that for which there is experience’ that will live through the consequences, conditions, opportunities of the future, so long as there is life to live it.

With our sentient minds and our technologically-advanced, organized industrial power, the effects of modern human civilization are nearer to our own idea of the limitless power of god than to the relative powerlessness of the antelope, or the salmon, or the bonobos and birds against something like climate change, or an asteroid strike that could have been averted, if only the algae or cats of the planet had their own system of sky-facing instruments, satellites, and everything that would have to exist for this to be so.

With great power comes great responsibility, we know this to be true, inherently. With our collective powers, human civilization can either dominate and consume the Earth with ease (as we are still doing), and thus consume and end ourselves, or we can embrace the duty concomitant to intelligence as is afforded the sentient, self-conscious, civilized and science-able, industrious beings as we, and then treat the Earth not as something to be used, but something to be protected and loved, cherished and celebrated.

If we are to survive on Earth, and if the Earth and its life-supporting systems are to survive the reign of humans, then the people of the Earth must find a way to trust one another, to see our common humanity, our common future, and to, in deed and desire, become the stewards of the Earth, and of each other, and to do so with compassion --to use the best of our humanity to save ourselves from the worst of our fundamentally irrational, animal nature.

Let us, then, to the future, together, with education, empathy, and love.

- James McMurtrie

Addendum: Hey, thanks for reading. I realize that I have not, above, laid out what I believe to be the best solutions and paths for climate change. I should like to, at another time. This piece was simply to educate myself, to share these findings with you, and to address a large ideological problem that I constantly see, re: people who do not understand climate change, and who thus do not believe that it is a real problem worth addressing.

Further, here are some more photos that I took at the climate change protest back in September of 2019, here in Toronto.

Although it would seem reasonable to assume that everyone seen in these photos would believe what I am here sharing, I cannot say this, because these are candid photos, and I do not know any of these folks. So, I should like to say that nobody in the photos, above or below, endorses that which I have shared.

They did come out to support the cause, and that’s great. It was a bittersweet day, that; beautiful, lots of human connection and love, support, but also the sharing of sad, troubling, challenging information.

Stay safe, y’all, and enjoy the photos —enjoy our beautiful world!

This is absolutely one of my favourite photos. I’d love to see this shot get back to these peeps. :)

Mmhmm, yup, write that salient point down.

Old farts matter, too; thanks for the support!

A healthy planet Earth is worth more than any pile of money.

In this context, a perfectly normal thing to wear to the park. haha. I love the bee costume (left), btw.

Sweet threads. I’m sure having read the anime (or manga?) would add to the effect.

Politically active, I was not, at that age.

It’s a wonderful planet we have, let’s take care of it!

Little candid image, as I was leaving. Lovely people, going about their lovely lives.

Two-tone instance of my favourite flower (one of them, at least) the cosmos (what a surprise…).

Well, if we let the fire burn on, then, yes, that would be the effect. It doesn’t have to be.

James McMurtrie is a photographer, a writer, a human person with thoughts.

This is climate change.

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