…and I only used that title because my original thought (“Just. Fuck. Off.”) may have been judged as a little intemperate.
Once more unto the hysterical breach, my friends:
The planet is grappling with a “new reality” as it reaches the first in a series of catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate tipping points: the widespread death of coral reefs, according to a landmark report produced by 160 scientists across the world.
As humans burn fossil fuels and ratchet up temperatures, it’s already driving more severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires. But there are even bigger impacts on the horizon. Climate change may also be pushing Earth’s crucial systems — from the Amazon rainforest to polar ice sheets — so far out of balance they collapse, sending catastrophic ripples across the planet.
“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world, with devastating consequences for people and nature,” said Tim Lenton, a professor at the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and an author of the report published Sunday.
In other words:
Sorry, but nobody with any form of humanoid brain should give any credence to these hysterical “Do this NOW or we’re all gonna dieeeeeee!” doomsayings anymore.
In the first place, “climate change” is not the major consequence of human activity. Considering that almost every “landmark study” — from Mann’s infamous (and debunked) “hockey stick” graph onwards — has been based on flawed, incorrect or fraudulent data manipulation, not least in predictive climate models, there is no reason to suggest that there is anything we as humans can do to somehow affect any form of climate change, let alone reverse it. (Even assuming that mankind — and I’m looking at you, China and the other Third World nations — can actually act in concert, the entire activity could be reversed simply by the Sun doing one thing instead of another.)
In other words, there are greater forces in play here, and it doesn’t appear that people can do anything to affect them, even if they wanted to — and that’s a big if. Try telling the people who own these seafront properties in Hawaii, for example, to abandon them because the properties’ existence may be harming the offshore reefs:
They’ll tell you to fuck right off, and I can’t say I blame them.
Now tell China and India to stop the pollutant-heavy flow of the Yangtze and Ganges rivers (to name but two) into the ocean, and the response will be “fuck right off, squared“.
As for the statement: “…multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world, with devastating consequences for people and nature”, what’s happening here is the old extension of Murphy’s Law (If something can go wrong, it will) which states: “If a number of things can go wrong, they will either go wrong simultaneously or else in the order best designed to create the maximum damage.”
It’s a humorous take on failure, but like “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords” is not a good basis for government, basing ecological policy on Murphy’s Extended Law is just as foolish.
Of course, the greater the preponderance of factors pointing to massive failure, the greater the need for panic and precipitous action to prevent it. Hence the grouping of ocean current weakening, coral reef disintegration and cataclysmic weather events into one Great Big Disaster. (They left Donald Trump out of the list of calamities, but that’s probably just an oversight.)
Sorry, but we’ve seen, and recently, the dolorous consequences of precipitous, fear-driven action as a response to perceived calamity (#Covid). The same attitude (“we won’t be fooled again”) should apply equally to these climate loons’ dire predictions.
By the way: if you really want to worry about something occurring in nature, try this one. And there’s not a single thing we can do about it. Not even selling our evil SUVs or eliminating plastics.
