This week’s news includes the World Meteorological Organization’s statement that 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, at 1.45 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond 1.5 C, the ceiling adopted at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, ocean heat waves will kill 90% of the world’s coral reefs, lethal heat domes will quadruple, and drought and floods will reflect a hotter atmosphere’s ability to hold more water longer and then dump it all at once. Sea level will rise, glaciers and ice caps will melt, tropical diseases will spread beyond the tropics, and forest fires will destroy cities.
Nothing in current climate policy indicates that Earth’s temperature rise will stop at 1.5 Celsius. Instead, we’ll see an end to mere linear increases in temperature as exponential feedback loops kick in.
Observers point to the unprecedented temperature increase in 2023 over 2022 as the start of a temperature “hockey stick,” where Earth phase-changes into a hothouse planet.
(The average world temperature since April 2023 is now 1.57 Celsius above pre-industrial levels.)
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The last time anything like this happened was 55 million years ago, during the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), which raised Earth’s temperatures 5 to 8 degrees Celsius. Lots of species became extinct, sea level was at least two hundred feet higher, and massive areas of the planet were either deserts or mudholes.
Earth, with humanity as its change agent, is doing it again. PETM conditions could return in a geological instant. At worst, the oceans would turn to lifeless purple acid, as has occurred during a couple of Earth’s past extinctions. A less-than-worst scenario (at least as far as Earth and its less-sentient creatures are concerned) has humans wiping themselves out.
Everything I have researched about climate, resource depletion, and our ability to sustain ourselves on a damaged planet has convinced me the end is near enough that the last individual of our species is now alive.
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The invasion of Ukraine was a moment of deep despair for me. It came with the realization that humans will forever refuse to see climate change as a drop-everything-and-fix-it crisis. It meant that our default position, when faced with extinction, is to hypnotize ourselves with nationalism, ancient grudges, and war.
By the time they’re over, Ukraine and its daughter wars will have destroyed most of the remaining resources of the planet. A world war will put out enough greenhouse gases that the survivors will have a good chance of seeing PETM atmospheric conditions by 2050.
An all-out nuclear exchange, with its destruction of civilization and a nuclear winter, now looks like the best possibility multicellular life has for continued existence. I’m betting on rodents, island-isolated southern hemisphere corvids, cockroaches, and—my ace in the hole—the deep-sea life feeding on the sulfur-fixing bacteria living in superheated volcanic vents.
I don’t expect human-style consciousness to emerge for a few hundred million years, if ever, although I’ve wondered if rats and maybe ravens, living in a world of abandoned human machines and structures, might evolve into opportunistic tool-users. Cities will be sites of concentrated metal oxides. Gold, aluminum, platinum, and certain stainless steels will persist for eons in usable forms. Highways will be mineable for their petroleum.
If species eventually adapt to almost any environment, humanity’s waste—I include the ruins, topographic neoforms, and landfills we’ll leave behind—will constitute a template for a humbler post-Holocene form of consciousness, one with a limited capacity for technology but a large capacity for philosophy.
Had humans evolved into a world littered with the great porcelain ruins of a dinosaur civilization, we might have invented fallible gods, gods who had to pay attention to the laws of physics or die.
Instead, we’ve invented fallible scientists. Of course, scientists are fallible—they’re human—but they tend to be right more than wrong. At present a whole subgroup of them, the ones studying climate, are frightened by their discipline. Those are data points we should attend to. Instead, we’re doing our best to pretend that people who have spent their lives training to be empiricists are imagining monsters under their beds.
There are far richer deposits of fantasy than the ones found in science. Our religious narratives, for example, distract us from our mortality, from the blinding speed of exponential growth, and from the results of burning every bit of carbon we can find. Elections, wars, presidential candidates, sports, reality TV: all imaginative ways of keeping our attention away from the fact that we’ve irretrievably fouled our own nest.
Civilization has become an elaborate stage set for an impossible narrative, one that prefers magical thinking to thinking, the human arena to the cosmos, power to restraint, the status quo to its rapidly approaching consequences.
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It’s possible that our conscious minds cannot conceive of our own deaths, or the deaths of our offspring. But our unconscious minds are thinking about those things all the time, at least if you believe Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death.
Becker picks up where Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents leaves off, baldly stating that civilization, with all its arts and technologies and wealth, is a hedge against death. It’s not the inevitable march of humanity toward the stars. It’s a device to project the past onto the present, in the form of ornate tombs for emperors and pharaohs, museum wings named for murderous pharmaceutical and fossil-fuel firms, legacies to favorite nephews, books, paintings, songs, and a bunch of lesser works including mass shootings and the murder of political opponents.
These things all say to posterity, “I existed. I find immortality in my tomb, in the buildings I caused to be built, in the academic chairs I endowed, in the kindergarten shootings I committed, in my great empty houses, in my diaries, in my crime sprees, in my declarations of war.”
Posterity, for its part, won’t care. It tends to view the past as full of dead people whose works, good and bad, no longer matter. That usually changes when the time comes to construct its own monuments.
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Becker says personality itself is an artifact of our compulsive avoidance of death. What we consider the self is a collection of narratives, each constructed to counter some aspect of non-existence. In a posthumous volume, Escape from Evil, Becker suggests that we imagine others—not just Christ—to be able to die for us, and that reading the obituary columns provides proof that we still exist and various friends, enemies, and strangers don’t. Each death, while we go on living, is cause for a small rejoicing.
All the evil in the world comes from our need to reassure ourselves of our footing on the slippery slope of mortality, once we seize the power to manufacture our own evidence.
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Julie and I once visited the National Gallery in London, where a surprising number of paintings are depictions of heaven. The scenery is that of an English summer garden. The souls of the departed lie about in green meadows, and although not everybody gets a harp, everyone has a voice, with which to sing the praises of the Lord.
It might be fun for an afternoon, but heaven looks tedious in the long run, and I take these paintings as evidence that we cannot imagine an eternity that isn’t deadly boring. In the National Gallery, it’s a bourgeois picnic, after which one will return to a country house to plan fox hunts, run for Parliament, or seduce a scullery maid. Hardly a meaningful way to live while you’re waiting for the heat-death of the universe, some trillions of years hence.
There are pictures of hell, too, done by more imaginative artists, or by the same artists during manic episodes, or by artists prescient about capitalism and greenhouse gases. They’re not as tedious, unless you believe that hell occupies the same eternity that heaven does. Then it requires a belief in the soul’s capacity to experience pain but not destruction.
I wouldn’t last very long in either place. I doubt that anyone could. In this life, I’ve seen souls dissolved by both wealth and poverty, pleasure and pain, spiritual mania and materialist obsession.
Souls are fragile. It’s hard to imagine them lasting very long in the caustic presence of consciousness. Heaven, except in its Buddhist manifestation as non-existence, is a place where you must be asleep to comfortably hang out.
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John F. Kennedy famously said that after a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if human civilization continues with business as usual, the living will be envying the dead by 2050, and shortly thereafter, they will be dead, too. Humans are not built to get along in the presence of scarcity, so the haves and the have-nots will engage in mutual destruction on local, state, national and international levels. All wars are civil wars, if you start with the reasonable solipsism that all humans share a common humanity.
In the philosophical arena I’ve described here, it’s difficult to get excited about making meaning. If consciousness will inevitably end, why bother to maintain it and its worries any longer? Isn’t it better to ease into the soft, warm, fur-lined world of the dream, where you can just make stuff up and it’s as real as anything else?
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the collective unconscious (an unproven Jungian concept, but a useful hypothesis in this instance) has turned our attention away from the terrifying realities of climate trends. Humanity has created its own heaven. If its wars, mass vaccination refusals, fascist political parties, social media, billionaire bunkers, and deep state conspiracy theories look a bit like hell, that’s only because the collective unconscious is distracting us from something worse.
It's counterintuitive, but some of us want to stay woke. That’s not wokeness as we normally understand it these days. It’s simply a perverse commitment to being aware of what’s going on. Climate scientists, astrophysicists, and people with thermometers are looking at data without limbic-system filters, trying to place accelerating events in deep temporal perspective, trying not to reject what we don’t like just because we don’t like it.
As we face the end, there’s a bit of good, or at least interesting, cheer: we get to stay awake to see it.