It’s been almost 3 months since I published the Handbook to the Apocalypse. It’s gotten far more attention than I expected, given that I did nothing to promote it except posting a link to my tiny twitter and mastodon accts. Medium tells me it’s gotten just over 30k views to date, which is still minuscule compared to a celebrity posting about their lunch, but not bad for a dry, 57-page intelligence report. Google doesn’t provide any metrics (that I’m aware of) to know how many times the PDF was downloaded. It hadn’t occurred to me to narrate an audio version, so I was pleasantly surprised when Michael Dowd created a recording and shared that.
I made a few small updates to the Handbook and published those edits today. The last 3 months have seen some incredible climate developments and I did not attempt to incorporate all the recent news around: El Nino progression, record EEI, global average temperature records, sea surface temperatures, Antarctic ice records, wildfires, hail storms, floods, home insurer pullouts, crop damage, political backsliding, etc. The only notable new inclusion is I wanted to address Hansen’s recent frantic attempts to calm the outcries sparked by his Pipeline paper. The new paragraph is added at the end of Section 5.1.
One of the most common responses that I’ve gotten to the Handbook is people asking “what should we do now?”. That will be the topic of my next article, which will differ substantially from the Handbook in that Part 2 will be much lighter on science papers and much heavier on my personal opinions and political analysis. In short, my answer is to sharpen those guillotine blades and remove the billionaires from power as quickly as possible. Of course that prompts the follow-on question “to what effect?”, which is why that answer really needs to be fleshed out into its own full length article.
Relatedly, no, Sam Hall is not my real name. It’s a reference to a Johnny Cash song, actually an old folk song that Cash covered. When you advocate beheading billionaires it’s best to practice at least the basics of internet hygiene.
