widespread adverse impacts
Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Sixth Assessment Report. It is a desperate plea for action disguised as a 3,675-page PDF of scientific research. Absent is any British-toned cooing about despoiling our planet. Absent is the notion that the future tense could save us. “Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts […]”
The tense is past and present. The future is scenarios. “Scenarios are neither predictions nor forecasts but rather ‘foresights’, which imply envisioning challenging futures,” explains the report. Things will be bad or worse depending on our responses to them. Sea level rise, ocean acidification, ecosystem collapse, tickborne diseases, waterborne diseases, species extinction, permafrost melt, water scarcity, crop failure, suicides. The list goes on, and it is not really a list:
Climate change impacts and risks are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. Multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously, and multiple climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions. Some responses to climate change result in new impacts and risks. (high confidence)
The present erodes like a coastline. All I can think of is beach plastic, billions of moon jellyfish, and summer notions of small aircraft. Can you hear it? It sounds like negative impacts on mental health in North America (high confidence). It sounds like near-famine conditions, adaptive capacity, blue whale ship-strike risk in near-real time. It sounds like prophecy, like radio. Like a gull, like an insult, like the curse of a beachfront memory from way before you were born.
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On the internet, a soldier walks along a forked road in Ukraine, cradling a Saab Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW). I don’t have any way of knowing where or what it is for sure. But tanks smolder. The man taking the video laughs and says something I don’t understand. Below the tweet, someone has posted a Google Maps satellite image of the same place before the war. The image is deathly still: a diverging road, a patch of dead grass, an illegible sign under pixellated clouds. Two hovering arrows mark that it has been mapped. The virtual marks potential pathways but in the video there are only tank tracks in the mud. Can you hear it? There is machine gun fire nearby. The soldier holds the NLAW like a lost sheep.
ben tapeworm