There’s Nothing You Can Do About Climate Change
Odd thought - climate change is real but accelerated by the appearance of humans and industrialisation. We see the effects and the extremities because we're a global species with the technologies to view and record it happening.
No other species did in the past so they were never aware of it, nor the great extinction events that were taking place. These took millions of years and it's still incomprehensible for humans to think along those timeframes. Change on a planetary scale isn't going to be altered by some man-made doohickery or planting trees, it's an unstoppable force of nature at work that will last beyond human civilization.
The chances are that every species that has lived or will ever live on Earth has and will be a part of this cycle and we're just one of them with the capacity to grasp what is happening and the audacity to believe we can stop it.
In a million years the surface of the Earth could be an arid wasteland with oceans choked with plastic and an atmosphere that isn't breathable. It could take another hundred million years to become habitable again with new life that might not be human anymore.
Who knows?
No-one does.
The point is, what we think we can do now with all our fancy promises about carbon emissions in 2050 and technologies we can chat to will have absolutely no effect on a chain of events that takes thousands upon thousands of years to unfold.
We're just not prepared to accept it.
Think about the evolutionary cycles the planet has already witnessed in 4 billion years and will witness again. Our involvement has only hurried some of that along by wiping out species by our own actions but arguably they could have been wiped out anyway.
Or maybe that species would have been the seed for another evolutionary cycle that would have driven life to emerge again and in destroying them we've removed the chance for life to survive this next cataclysm.
The Earth ends up like Mars.
What’s also pretty clear is that the “Climate Scam” people are partially correct but not in the way they believe.
There is climate change. It's coming. It's happening and will continue to happen over millennia. The real 'scam' is the narrative that any human impact can be mitigated with political will and increased taxation to slow/ reverse/ halt/ alter the trajectory of something this big. It's sheer nonsense. As is the Stop Oil bullshit performance art.
Not even science can explain what happened in the past accurately as much as it can project accurately what will happen over the next 10 million years.
Plastics can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose, depending on the material and structure and it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. Unfortunately, the bags don't break down completely but instead photo-degrade, becoming microplastics that absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment. But even in that timeframe that's just yet another blip in terms of how long this planet's climate will take to recycle to its eventual conclusion and bring around another extinction and evolutionary beginning as it has done many times before.
The climate tech market that is worth $20bn is absolutely meaningless, nothing more than feel-good technologies to ease the troubled mind and make it appear we’re doing something impactful. There is no impact here, no moving of a planetary-sized needle by tiny hands. We will try, we can’t even claim that we’ll try our best because we don’t, we do enough to signal that we made an effort and no more, all the while burning more resources to make products and technologies that really do fuck all in the grand scheme of things. Venture capitalists who claim to look for exponential ideas or concepts to accelerate humanity really don’t stand by any of it.
Gotta love VCs whose investment thesis revolves around funding technologies that accelerate humanity while civilization is on the brink thanks to the collapse of the climate caused by funding technologies that accelerate humanity.
The chances are, that when this extinction event is finished, there will be nothing left to show we existed, no wonderous technologies or buildings, nor anything in terms of new life that will emerge who can make sense of any of it. It’s funny to think that humanoids are at the top of the evolutionary process and possess the ability to harness the world around them, even funnier to consider that they all get one shot with the planet they inhabit. The Fermi Paradox may well be explained not just by distance and time but by the fact that every life bearing planet went through several evolutionary extinctions to produce a humanoid species capable of understanding and intelligence only for them to fuck it all up every single time.
Who knows, there may well be an infinitely small percentage that makes it, that don’t make the same mistakes we do and are, like us at this moment in time, searching for themselves elsewhere in the Universe.
Read World Without Us by Alan Weisman then go live your best life.
The dinosaurs certainly did.
