In describing climate consequences—the ones more serious than hotter summers—I feel as if I am describing top-down cascading failures. The classic example is the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, which in 2001 had collapsed, floor after floor, down to the ground—this despite the fact that all the initial damage had been confined to their upper floors. Debris from a high-level event could damage structural elements far below, with incalculable results.
Create potential energy and it can be turned into kinetic energy. “The bigger [or higher] they are, the harder they fall.”
Here is a recent opinion piece by Umair Haque, of the kind you will not usually encounter in the US’s main-stream media (though he does write for the Harvard Business Review); it captures the anticipated climate consequences better than anything I have written.
“Covid required governments to step in and provide relief to entire societies. But that’s nothing compared with the [climate and ecological] catastrophes to come. Those catastrophes won’t just cause lockdowns, they’ll render entire states and cities and regions unlivable, burning them, sinking them, turning them into deserts and swamps. Governments will have to step in, yet again. They’ll have to invest huge, huge sums to try and repair all the damage of climate and ecological catastrophe.”
You may think, as I often do, that Umair overdoes the shock value in his conclusions (he is usually writing, after all, in the style of a regretful tirade), but he precedes his pronouncements with history: you cannot say they can’t happen, as he has just reminded you that similar situations have happened multiple times before. You might disagree with how evil he paints the present-day GOP, while agreeing with him that evil is certainly the direction they are heading. –WHC
Clipped from: https://medium.com/@umairh?p=934b7192153b
If It Feels Like Civilization is Beginning to Die a Little More Every Day, That’s Because It Is
by Umair Haque
Is it just me? I have this bad, bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. And the more I think about it, I have to be up front with the thought which keeps nagging away at me. It goes like this. Our civilisation is now entering a death spiral.
Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe you feel it, too. Let me try and explain the thoughts I’ve been having.
How do civilisations die? Why does it feel like ours is? It’s not just hundreds of millions doing TikTok dances while the planet burns. It’s not even billionaires cackling all the way to the bank at how proles have chosen self-destruction over renewal. It’s about a death spiral. An interlinked domino effect, a cascade of economic, political, social, and cultural ruin.
I can see that cascade, that domino effect, everywhere I look now. And the problem is, just like dominoes falling, once it begins, made of self-accelerating feedback effects…it’s unstoppable.
So. How will our civilisation die? Well, probably something a lot like this. The last two years of Covid, in fact, give us plenty of clues — and dire omens, too.
As climate change and ecological apocalypse bite down, huge sums of money will have to be spent to repair the damage they do. Think Covid, but on a mega-scale. Covid required governments to step in and provide relief to entire societies. But that’s nothing compared with the catastrophes to come. Those catastrophes won’t just cause lockdowns, they’ll render entire states and cities and regions unlivable, burning them, sinking them, turning them into deserts and swamps. Governments will have to step in, yet again. They’ll have to invest huge, huge sums to try and repair all the damage of climate and ecological catastrophe.
