The audience reaction to the last two essays I’ve put up here turned out to be something of a surprise to me. A month and a half ago—has it been that long already?—I posted the first of two parts of an essay on climate change, listing three things that each side of today’s climate debates get hopelessly wrong, and exploring the “crisis management model”: the system by which our managerial class exploits crises rather than doing anything useful to help people deal with their consequences. I expected that to get screaming meltdowns from both sides, and was rather startled to get a few polite, pro forma objections from the right and next to nothing from the left.
Then there was the essay I posted two weeks ago exploring the way that the elite replacement cycle now taking place is triggering emotional reactions down into the brainstem level, and suggesting that this was responsible for at least some of the spectacular paralogic that otherwise intelligent people so often babble these days. I’ve discussed this in passing before with very little result, but this time I got screaming meltdowns from both sides. Quite a few readers from the left thus angrily insisted that the managerial class doesn’t run things, that it’s not being shoved out of the seats of power by a rising entrepreneurial class, or (in some cases) both of these things at once. That is to say, there were some fine examples of status panic on display.
A whole sequence of readers on the right, for their part, took issue with my comment that social status is assigned by society rather than by biology. That’s an odd claim for conservatives to challenge, since the view they were defending would imply (for example) that the steep rise in status that women have experienced over the last three quarters of a century was biologically preordained, and the only thing they could therefore do was accept it. All in all, I watched the replies come in with a familiar feeling of wry amusement, and chalked it up as more evidence for the weirdly unpredictable nature of human behavior.
It remains to be seen what kind of reaction this post is going to get. This week, as promised a month and a half ago, we’re going to discuss what the world can actually expect over the next few centuries from the changing climate. Here again, it’s going to be necessary to set aside the viewpoints of both of the officially accepted viewpoints of our time, and push past the rhetoric to see what’s actually going on.
Let’s begin with a crucial point. It’s a common belief, but a false one, that the world’s climate stayed more or less the same until our greenhouse gas emissions changed things. The industrial revolution got under way three centuries ago in a world coming out from under the bitter cold of the Little Ice Age; the 18th century was much cooler than the present; the 19th saw general improvement in the climate of the temperate world, interrupted by bursts of volcanic cooling in 1816 and 1883, but brought devastating droughts to much of the tropical world; the 20th saw the general cooling trend that inspired the “new ice age” panic of the 1970s and 1980s, before this was drowned out by the impact of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions at century’s end.
Thus it’s safe to say that climate is complex, and many factors feed into its constant changes. To go further, and get a broader sense of what we can expect from the future, it’s necessary to seek guidance from a less biased source than the arbitrary, repeately disproven models of climate scientists, on the one hand, and the overheated handwaving of conservative pundits on the other. That source? Paleoclimatology, and in particular the abundant evidence for dramatic climate change at various points in the prehistoric past.
Now of course this is yet another red cloth waved in front of an already overexcited bull. Suggest that the evidence of the past can be used to make sense of climate trends in the present and you can bet your bottom dollar that you’ll get pushback. That varies, of course, depending on which side it comes from. The voices on the right, for example, quite often insist that because climate change happened in prehistoric times for reasons that had nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gas emissions can’t cause climate change. This is rather like insisting that because people died before the invention of firearms, firearms can’t kill people.
Behind all this lies the bizarre but widespread modern fallacy that nothing can have more than one cause. It’s probably necessary to be explicit here: climate change is always driven by many, many causes pushing in every imaginable direction, and the resulting change represents the constantly changing balance between these competing forces. Thus it’s quite true to say that greenhouse gas emissions aren’t acting alone—but it’s equally true that if you dump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, that’s going to have an effect. Yes, this is true even if those make up only a fraction of a per cent of the atmosphere; there are poisons that will drop you stone cold dead if you have one part per million of them in your bloodstream, you know, and the logic is the same here.
The standard fallacy on the left is different, though it’s just as inaccurate. In leftward circles, if you bring up the evidence of paleoclimatology, people will insist loudly that anthropogenic climate change is by definition bigger, faster, and much, much worse than anything that nature does on her own. That’s another very common belief these days. It’s also the best evidence I know of that most people are pigheadedly ignorant about prehistory and have never bothered to think through the implications of what little they do know.
Consider Earth’s most recent major extinction crisis, just 65 million years ago—a mere eyeblink in geological time. That was when a chunk of rock six miles across came shrieking down out of deep space at hypersonic speed and slammed into our planet near the northwest corner of the Yucatan peninsula. The resulting blast has been estimated at 100 million megatons, or more than 15,000 times the explosive force you’d get by setting off every nuclear bomb on Earth at once.
In the milliseconds after the impact, a fireball shot out more than a hundred miles in every direction and incinerated everything in its path. Then came the shock wave, which annihilated every living thing across an area the size of Europe. As that was hitting, chunks of white-hot rock blown clear out of the atmosphere into space began to fall everywhere on Earth, igniting planetwide fires. When those died down, dust and smoke in the upper atmosphere blotted out the sun, plunging the world into bitterly cold conditions. It only took a few years at most for conditions to return to normal, but when it was all over, two-thirds of the species on Earth had been wiped out. Compared to that, our current ecological mess is pretty weak tea.
Consider, for that matter, a much more recent bout of climate change, the one that took place around 9600 BC at the end of the Younger Dryas climate stage. Over the last few decades, advances in atmospheric chemistry have made it possible to get sensitive readings of average global temperatures from air bubbles trapped in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps—the warmer Earth was on average when these tiny air samples were trapped, the more of certain isotopes show up in them. That’s how we know that when the Younger Dryas ended, the Earth’s average temperature jolted up between 13° and 15°F. in less than a decade.
So many people have gone out of their way to misunderstand this that it’s probably necessary to talk about it in a little more detail. No, this doesn’t mean that everywhere on Earth saw local temperatures jolt up between 13° and 15°F.; the planet’s average temperature went up that much. Most of the change was focused on the north polar regions, where temperatures soared up out of deep freeze levels, pushing the great glacial sheets of the late Ice Age into their final collapse and sending sea levels raggedly upward for the next few thousand years, drowning thousands of square miles of once-dry land. The temperate zones warmed to a more modest degree, while the tropics and the south polar regions apparently didn’t see much temperature change at all.
Climate change is complex, shaped by many factors. The fact remains that the Younger Dryas temperature spike was orders of magnitude faster and more drastic than our current experience of climate change. What’s more, our ancestors survived it—humanity had settled every continent but Antarctica long before 9600 BC—and so did every species that exists today. Not all species made it, of course; the minor extinction crisis that hit at the end of the Younger Dryas is the reason we don’t have woolly mammoths, cave bears, and dire wolves strolling around our national parks these days.
Mind you, there are also plenty of examples of prehistoric climate change that were much slower than this. Climates change at varying speeds, and of course that’s exactly the point. The current example of the type is nothing new on this planet. Among its many causes—again, no event anywhere in the cosmos ever has only one cause—is one that’s somewhat unusual: vast amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere by human smokestacks and tailpipes. Even that’s unusual only because of its source, since climate change due to volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide is a familiar process here on Earth.
(It’s at least possible that ours isn’t the first technological civilization to imitate volcanoes and dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for that matter. Back in the Mesozoic Era, as I noted a month and a half ago, two sudden temperature spikes—the Toarcian greenhouse event 183 million years ago in the Jurassic and the Cenomanian-Turonian greenhouse event 94 million years ago in the Cretaceous—look enough like our current example of climate change that I’ve wondered if intelligent saurians might have been responsible for them. Of course geologists blame them on volcanic activity, but it’s not as though they’re looking into the possibility that intelligent beings might have been the cause instead. There are a few other events of the same general type scattered through prehistory, so it may be time to consider the possibility that intelligent species who dig up fossil fuels, burn them, and heat up the planet a little may be a recurring feature of Earth’s history.)
As I noted a month and a half ago, none of this justifies either of the claims being splashed around by the two sides in our current climate wars. One of my readers summed up those claims neatly by pointing out that by and large, Republicans embrace denial and Democrats embrace delusion. One consequence of these unproductive habits is that we can be perfectly sure that nothing will be done by either side to change the trajectory of climate change—the Republicans aren’t interested, and the Democrats have gone out of their way to embrace supposed “solutions” that solve nothing, while refusing to give up their own carbon-intensive lifestyles.
It’s safe to assume, therefore, that all the Earth’s remaining commercially accessible reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas will be extracted and burnt over the next century or so, and the resulting CO2 will go into the atmosphere as usual. Those reserves aren’t limitless—that’s one of the things climate models routinely miss—and so CO2 dumping will taper off over the course of the current century. Even so, a lot of greenhouse gases are on their way into the atmosphere. What follows from that?
First, we can expect climate belts to continue shifting toward the poles. That’s been the most visible consequence of climate change over the last few decades; it’s the reason why the last two winters here in southern New England have been nearly devoid of snow, why southern Europe is getting the kind of bitter droughts and heat waves that used to be standard south of the Mediterranean, and why Russia is harvesting bumper crops of grain these days as the growing season lengthens. As this suggests, there will be winners as well as losers from these changes. Some areas that are currently too cold or too dry for agriculture will get increased warmth and adequate rain, while others that are now breadbaskets may become deserts.
Second, there will be localized tipping points as various regions slip across thresholds that cause sudden shifts in climate conditions. 6000 years ago, during the postglacial Hypsithermal—the period after the last ice age when global temperatures were significantly higher than they are now—the Sahara and Arabian deserts weren’t deserts. They got annual monsoon rains, as the plains of East Africa do now, and had the same sort of climate and wildlife: gazelles, giraffes, lions, and so on. As the Hypsithermal ended and the world cooled, the monsoon rains stopped, and both regions turned into sun-scorched wastelands. As the climate changes back to a warmer setting, that same threshold will be crossed the other way, and the rains will return.
By and large, a warmer world is a wetter world, since increased air temperatures lead to increased evaporation from the world’s oceans. That doesn’t mean that every desert will bloom in the warming future, though. During that same Hypsithermal period, the western half of North America was far more arid than it is today. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Nebraska sandhills. Those are covered with grass today, but 6000 years ago they were bare sand dunes, part of the bleak, sun-scorched desert that a cooling climate turned into the Great Plains. In the future, as this returns, the Appalachians will likely become the boundary between the forest zone of the east coast and the grasslands of the Midwest, and the Mississippi—a much narrower river due to decreased rainfall—will become the boundary between plains and desert.
Third, we can expect at least a modest amount of sea level rise. Conservatives love to point out that this hasn’t happened yet to any significant degree, and they’re quite correct—it takes a lot of warming to begin to melt major ice sheets, and we’re only just starting to see the first traces of serious melting now. As that threshold is passed, expect sea level to start creeping up an inch or two a year, with occasional surges as ice sheets break down and send huge masses of ice spewing into the world’s oceans to drift away and melt. Glacial melting isn’t a fast process.
That doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant. We’ve already reached the point that some neighborhoods in cities on the US east coast flood when onshore stormwinds happen to come at the same time as an unusually high tide. Low-lying districts of Miami have salt water bubbling up from their drains when that happens these days; the New York subway system has to be pumped out now and then under similar conditions, and islands in the Mississippi delta are vanishing beneath the rising waters of the Gulf. That isn’t the end of the world, but it costs. That’s the real secret of climate change. Think of it as a tax that nature places on all human economic activity.
That tax is no more equitably levied than the ones imposed by human governments. If you happen to live in a low-lying coastal area, nature’s tax could very easily reduce the value of your real estate to zero and force you to relocate in the years ahead. If you happen to live eighty feet above sea level in a southern New England state that’s seeing much milder winters these days, as I do, nature’s tax might not cost you anything at all. It’s the overall impact on industrial society that matters, though, because it’s not as though we’re in a good position to cover another round of increased costs on top of everything else.
The supreme fallacy of current climate change rhetoric, after all, is that it treats the changing climate as the only thing that matters, and sweeps all the other problems with industrial society’s mismanagement of the planet under the nearest convenient rug. In an earlier post—and of course in dozens of posts on my earlier blog, The Archdruid Report—I pointed out the downsides of our civilization’s breakneck extraction of the fossil fuel resources that power nearly all of our technology. That’s only one of the many symptoms of our collective blindness to the planetary systems that keep us all alive.
It’s reached the point now that there’s not a single nonrenewable resource on the planet we’re not using up, not a single renewable resource we’re not exploiting faster than it can regenerate, and not a single natural system that isn’t being disrupted by the waste products of our industries and our lifestyles. Nor is this going to change, because neither side in the current political wars is willing to do anything to change it. As noted above, one side embraces denial and the other side embraces delusion; the right insists that nothing can possibly be wrong, while the left pretends that everything can be fixed so long as we spend lots of tax money on things that haven’t done a bit of good so far (and, though they won’t say this out loud, so long as we keep the working classes and the poor shut out of the carbon-intensive lifestyles the privileged classes insist are theirs by right).
It’s an ugly spectacle, and it’s leading straight into a difficult future. Nor is there any good reason to think that such a future can be averted at this point. There was, I think, a window of opportunity in the early 2000s, when the peak oil movement was hitting its stride and climate change activism hadn’t yet been completely hijacked by corporate interests. It’s been years, though, since that window was slammed shut. These days, very few people anywhere are foolish enough to think that shoveling more government funding toward solar photovoltaic systems and wind farms will accomplish anything more than it’s done over the last two decades.
A great many people, for that matter, have caught onto the way that climate-apocalypse rhetoric has been used to bully and browbeat them into compliance with projects that have nothing to do with the climate, and everything to do with the kleptocratic feeding frenzies that count as business as usual in our hopelessly corrupt societies. They’ve been told so many lies by so many experts that it’s a waste of time at this point trying to convince them that climate change really could pile massive costs on the world’s economies. That being the case, all we can probably do is brace ourselves for the consequences. In an upcoming post, I’ll have some suggestions about how that might be done.
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I have just been reminded that this month has five Wednesdays, and by longstanding tradition, that means the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on topics for the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want me to write about?
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here [7/1]). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, drawn from the fuller list.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May NeptunesDolphins’s husband, who is due to have a toe removed on July 1st for a longstanding infection, receive the best medical intervention for his future health; may the procedure go smoothly and without complication; may he heal quickly and to the greatest extent possible before and after his surgery.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical (Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Absolutely spot on.. The big beautiful Bill is a great relief for those who are trying to save oceans from wind farms, and forests from Solar farms.
Related news:
https://www.icm.csic.es/es/noticia/detectan-una-reversion-importante-de-la-circulacion-oceanica-en-el-oceano-austral-con#:~:text=Gracias%20a
Haven’t actually read the post, I’m sure it’s good. But I invested too much emotional energy into my convictions to let them be challenged by some [insert race] [insert gender]! No No! Besides, watching Big Brother reruns is a much better use of my time!
Hi JMG,
A tangential remark maybe, but I got reminded of the old nuclear armagedon scare by your remark: “or more than 15,000 times the explosive force you’d get by setting off every nuclear bomb on Earth at once.” Where I live up until the end of the 90s there was a building law, that mandated every new house has a nuclear shelter. Just to drive home the panic, that we became so powerful, we could destroy the whole earth. So much for that childish delusion.
On a more direct note, as you say, there is no hope of stopping this fiasco from running at least into economic/political breakdown, maybe even a more dire civilizational one. And there is nothing I can do about it but on a personal level. So we started raising our own climate change rabbits (nomination for garage band name). The goal is to survive somehow, and the old literature about seed bearers of lost Atlantis might be to he point.
Best regards,
V
P.S.: Being a traditionalist Ecosophian, I notice there are 5 Wednesdays this month 🙂 And although it would gladden my heart to read about Wilhelm Reich. I will honor my promise and join the “Manufactured Patriarchy/Matriarchy myth” vote. This one is for you Erika; May 2025 Open post.
Did you know that there was one period in the early Triassic where it literally rained non-stop across the planet for 1-2 million years?:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnian_pluvial_episode
https://www.iflscience.com/when-earth-endured-two-million-years-of-rain-the-carnian-pluvial-event-76438
I just watched Ted Rall (cartoonist, Podcaster and leftist) on the TMI Show online. He brought up an recently published article that posits that a mass extinction 250 million years ago was due to deforestation, and we’d better PANIC BECAUSE THE FORESTS ARE DYING! Especially those ignorant Brazilians cutting down the Amazon rainforest. Never mind that recent thinking is that there was no Amazon Rainforest until European diseases wiped out the indigenous population 500 years ago. Rall was neutral, his conservative co-host mocked it.
A second vote for the Patriarchy/Patriarchy myth.
“since the view they were defending would imply (for example) that the steep rise in status that women have experienced over the last three quarters of a century was biologically preordained”
I notice this a lot from insecure “race realists” and other colorful characters. When society discriminated against groups they didn’t like, that was a natural and inevitable outcome from hard biological differences. But when the discrimination is lifted or shifts to their group, that’s an unnatural imposition. I hate to fulfill Godwin’s law, but it’s very much alike to the Nazi mythology which made the Jewish people simultaneously biologically inferior (and thus destined for servitude) but also portrayed the Jews as this powerful force that ruled all aspects of society (which, according to their logic, should have meant that they were biologically superior.)
One thing of note- the fact that social status is assigned by society rather than by biology holds true even into prehistory. For instance, many prehistoric graves have been found, filled with gold and precious burial goods, implying that the deceased was a highly esteemed member of society. In many cases, the body shows clear signs of genetic deformity and disability. If human society always valued the most biologically fit, this wouldn’t occur.
Dear JMG,
I have read repeated suggestions, by you and others, that perhaps some intelligent and high-technology species evolved on earth before mankind. But I find this hypothesis hard to accept.
If any such species did exist on earth, how could they not have left innumerable artifacts and evidence of their existence in the fossil record? Aside from a few stories of curious and usually not-well-documented “ooparts” (out-of-place artifacts), I see nothing to suggest the existence of such evidence. Granted, most of our own civilization’s artifacts will almost certainly be rusted, corroded or dissolved after just a few tens of thousands of years, but one would expect SOME evidence to survive, if only buried glass bottles, or the impressions of hardware in shale, or anomalous concentrations of metal oxides from corroded objects.
Also, most of the fossil fuels that we are currently burning through were formed and laid down many millions to hundreds of millions years ago. So why would a pre-human terran civilization not have used up those resources themselves, before we got to them? Similarly, there are, or were in recent history, many readily accessible metallic ore deposits that one would expect any previous civilization to have already mined and used up. Most metallic ores were deposited before the rise of complex life, so their utilization would necessarily have been a one-time occurrence, with no subsequent renewal likely or possible.
I’ve read rebuttals to these arguments of mine that perhaps such a pre-human civilization only existed in one part of the earth, or on a continent or part of the earth that no longer exists. But I find that argument unconvincing as well. Even before our own technological age, humans had spread to every continent but Antarctica, so why wouldn’t any previous technological race have done so as well?
Thank you for these clarifying thoughts. I continue to be grateful for your good work over these many years.
the recent bacchanalian excesses of the Bezos wedding should tell us all we need to know about the future of climate centered activism. the people who run the world have absolutely no intention of moderating their behavior. what possible difference does it make what the rest of us do? Even Greta Thunberg has fallen silent in the contemplation of such grotesque extravagance. where’s the outrage among the climate activists? are they, just possibly, unwilling to criticize their funders?
I think anytime you say “X is a social construct”, it will raise the hackles (justifiedly so based on recent history) of some people. You’re either one of those people who think everybody’s the same and people are blank slates that can be stamped and molded like car parts – or – you think that there are some qualities of being that are baked into the DNA that are hardwired in. And if you try to stamp people like car parts, you’ll waste your time and greatly annoy the person.
This, is one of the fault lines between “right” and “left” thinking people. Then, I guess there’s the people who think that DNA can be rewritten but fail badly at it. *coof* *coof*
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As far as climate change goes, I long gave up on it – it seems only a way to tell the rest of the world what your politics are and nothing more at this point. Trying to say anything nuanced or constructive about it is almost impossible. I must say though, that an enterprising scientist would like your statements about it being complicated and ambiguous. Why, it needs further study, it does. Which leads to more ambiguity, which leads to further studies, which leads to…
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Ellen, the Big Blobby Bill has plenty in it that I don’t like, but the termination of subsidies for these wasteful and ecologically destructive faux-green technologies is a definite bright point.
Gustavo, thanks for this. I’ll want to see those findings confirmed by other studies — there’s been a lot of dubious science on this subject in recent years — but of course it’s quite common for oceanic currents to change significantly as the climate shifts.
Brinco, no doubt! Let me assist:
Vitranc, the thing is, there was arguably a point to fallout shelters; since even an all-out nuclear war wouldn’t destroy the earth, staying in fallout shelters for a couple of weeks would save quite a few lives and make the rebuilding of neutral countries such as Austria a much easier proposition. Raising rabbits is another smart move, of course — and so is starting your own garage band! (People will want music in a deindustrializing world, after all.) As for the fifth Wednesday, I’ve tabulated your vote and added something to the bottom of the post.
David, that is to say, at the moment scientists speculate that it rained nonstop for that long. They know that it rained a lot over most of the planet during that period, but it’s not as though a dozen sunny weeks every year would show up in the fossil record!
Great Khan, by that logic, there must have been too many Brazilians 250 million years ago — or too many dinosaurs running around today. Do you think there’s a point to launching a campaign to stop saurian overpopulation? 😉
Enjoyer, exactly. If the Jews were actually the sort of all-powerful world-controlling force that anti-Semites believe they are, that would clearly show that they were a superior race — certainly superior to the anti-Semites! Equally, if social status is purely biological, the fact that white men have declined so sharply in status over the last century would prove that white men had suffered some kind of frightful biological degeneration over that period and no longer deserved their former superior status. Fortunately, the whole thing’s codswallop.
Alan, like most people who object to this theory, you haven’t taken deep time into account. If my proposal is correct, it’s been more than 90 million years since the last intelligent species before ours. 90 million years ago, the Rocky Mountains, the Andes, and the Himalayas didn’t exist yet, the strata from which we mine metals and coal were nowhere near the surface, and the oil and natural gas we use today were carbon-rich muck, still awaiting the millions of years of heat and pressure that would turn them into fuels. Metal, glass, concrete? 90 million years from now, none of that will remain; all that will be left of human industrial civilization will be a layer of carbon-rich rock a quarter of an inch thick, with some odd trace elements in it — and that’s exactly what we find at long intervals through the earth’s rock strata.
Donald, you’re welcome.
Moishe, exactly. As I noted a month and a half ago, it’s all just theater.
Other Owen, I know — but some things are social constructs, and there’s no way around that! Other things are biological, no question, but social status isn’t among them. As for further studies, no doubt, but the funding’s being cut — and that’s probably for the best, given the abysmal quality of so much research these days.
JMG, thank you for this, one of your best recent essays, IMHO. You do and commentariat do understand, I hope, that leftist and conservative pundits , propagandists and “influencers” are bought and paid for. Both sides, the right by corporate interests who want to get in on the Last Big Killing before retiring to their Patagonian hideaways, and the left by a collection of foundations pushing a variety of special causes. Neither side has any interest in us ordinaries and basics out here in nowheresville.
About the six mile wide asteroid, as I understand it, I hope I have this right, 65M years Before Present the continents were not where they are now. Pangea had broken up, but the fragments that were to become our present continents, were much closer that they are now. That is why dinosaur fossils are found on all continents, and why the impact was so very devasting. The piece of Pangea which would become India was then sitting above the hotspot that produced the Deccan Plateau. That same hotspot is still there in the Indian Ocean: its’ more recent activity gave us the islands Mauritius and Reunion. The million or so years of eruptions which produced the Deccan Traps were ongoing when the asteroid hit–multiple causes.
I add my vote for matriarchy/patriarchy and express the hope that you will discuss Marija Gimbutas, who really was a reputable scholar. I read her big book about the archeology of the Balkans. I thought her evidence did not necessarily prove the existence of matriarchal societies. I thought that the alleged peacefulness of the neolithic villages she excavated could be more easily explained by scarce population, plenty of resources for all.
“Enjoyer, exactly. If the Jews were actually the sort of all-powerful world-controlling force that anti-Semites believe they are, that would clearly show that they were a superior race — certainly superior to the anti-Semites! ”
I know this is a bit off topic but I thought this would be a good time to share a fascinating yet little known piece of history related to impressions of Jews.
Have you every heard of the Fugu Plan? It was a Japanese plan to settle Jews in their new territories in China. The Japanese participated in the Russian Civil War along the side of the counter-revolutionary Whites. Many of the White Russians were notoriously anti-Semitic and at the time, the Japanese knew little about Jews. As a source, the White Russians provided the Japanese with the notorious Protocals of the Elders of Zion telling of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
The Japanese militarists were…impressed at the capabilities of such an ethnic group and subsequently sought them as allies for their own plans!
https://www.amazon.ca/Fugu-Plan-Untold-Japanese-During/dp/9652293296
Oh! Mr. Greer … I see 2 synergistic effects derived from that rising CO2 chart above: vast amounts of bloviating hypocrisy + copious pulses of ambivalence (though one might have to squint one’s eyes to see it..)
For the fifth Wednesday, I would like something on esotericism, but I would like a commentary on the current Israeli war against Iran, and its military and political implications. That’s my vote for the fifth Wednesday.
Mr. Greer, I will note that there appears to be the observation by some scientists, that our planet’s magnetic poles are moving towards a phase change (possibly with some rapidity) .. with various hiccups in between. I have to wonder what knock-on effects this might have on climate chaotics..
You describe the muddled state of popular thinking about climate change very well, as per usual. To my mind, it’s one example out of many of a particular pattern that seems to be widespread in the entire Western world: correctly perceiving that “fill-in-the-blank-phenomenon” exists, and then leaping to all manner of ill supported conclusions about it. Economic problems, climate problems, population problems, mass migration problems, armed conflict problems, resource problems, etc. I can’t put my finger on whether the pattern is just the end stage of the Faustian worldview disproving itself; or the collapse into senility of the current PMC/liberal ideology; or something else. Still trying to come up with a name for the pattern of correctly perceiving that a thing exists, and then, not just completely failing to understand the nature of the thing perceived, but frenzied efforts to explain said thing in all possible ways except the ones that actually matter. “A fine theme for meditation,” as I imagine you would say.
On a side note, JMG, I’ve been reading your essays since about 2011. Whatever else happens to me in this life, I am grateful for every word you’ve written; I cannot imagine where my head would be vis-a-vis the current state of the world had I not had the good fortune to stumble upon your influence when I did. May the ancient starlight shine upon you.
It seems that the only thing industrialized civilization has accomplished over the last 25 years is to substitute AI and Data farms for automobiles as the biggest driver of climate change. Automobiles ( EV and Gas) are still huge sources of atmospheric C02. But they are not growing in impact the way energy guzzling data centers are.
This week the Oregon Legislature declined to pass a bill that would have added new funding sources for the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). As gas tax revenues are declining with less miles traveled and EV’s they are widely trying to get more revenue by raising gas taxes, registration fees etc. They once placed their hope on Tolls but as weird as it seems to East Coasters, people in the West have a huge aversion to any kind of tolling so this died politically a year ago.
Now the agency that builds and maintains state owned roads and distributes funding to cities for the same will shrink by 600 workers ( about 15%). I expect this is a trend that will continue in to the future and spread to all states ( if it has not already).
Resource depletion and the decline of empire will accomplish what 25 years of delusional EV hopium could not. A slow and steady reduction in CO2 by automobiles.
JMG, you got me there. I did not even think about the strategic parallels in rabbit raising and nuclear shelters. But yes, I get your point. Give shelter, weather the shale storm and be there to help rebuild. Help and inspire others, and maybe we can save something.
Might not look like much now and we might think ourselves spread out and not in a position to do much. But come other times and maybe the guy / gal with a good sense of self and a clue can silently inspire others to get together and row the boat so to speak. (shows I’ve been reading the MOE stuff 🙂 )
I think most people who bother to look at the data and think beyond the headlines realize that earth will be fine in the long term, as will the biosphere. Thing is, that doesn’t mean that human societies, or stony coral reefs, will be fine. And what most people care about most isn’t actually ‘the planet’, its themselves, their society and a limited assortment of other living things they interact with. And those are threatened by anthropocentric climate change to one extent or another.
But its also true that there are many other dangers we face at the moment, and that the left’s policies don’t seem to have done much to actually reduce CO2 output, especially on a global level. I’ve found myself prioritizing other issues much of the time on grounds that if the policies on offer are ineffective I might as well prioritize something else when I vote.
I probably should have addressed this in the “status panic” post, but that’s insomnia and its effects for you. I do think that the real ruling class, as it always is, are the people who own the means of production and the bulk of the assets, and technically, the Professional Managerial Class serves at the pleasure of this owning class. However, our present-day society is so very complex that getting rid of the PMC would be very inconvenient and messy, which has effectively made the PMC into a co-ruling class. However, as you have frequently pointed out, the PMC have done such a lousy job that what is causing the current status panic is that they are being gradually phased out as a consequence of their arrogant incompetence.
Hello everyone!
Last week’s Open Post had some discussions about vegetarianism which intrigued me a bit, so in that spirit I would like to propose for the Fifth Wednesday, “Physical and spiritual effects of diets; vegan/vegetarian, carnivore and omnivore”.
When it comes to climate, I don’t know much, I just hope it won’t be that bad. Winter is just my favourite season!
The Climate Change/Global Warming issue was marketed poorly. It is much easier to build a case around pollution and resource depletion as major problems/predicaments, and thus much easier to get a majority of people to rally around it. Though, admittedly, observing the human condition the last couple of decades has hardly made a case for protecting and preserving our species.
Climate change is very difficult to forecast locally, and can only be mitigated, so there’s less rush to counter that – just deal with it as it changes. Climate change, as a public issue, will be in the rear view mirror and forgotten long before it arrives as other factors overwhelm us.
My vote for the 5th Wednesday topic is an update on the “second religiosity”, though maybe it hasn’t officially started. All I know is I’ve had some whacky discussions around religion the last few months, and some folks are getting pretty stressed and starting to think about it more….
For fifth Wednesday, I vote for Gnosticism once again.
John, thoroughly enjoy these pieces on this subject, but am baffled by the lack of attention thus far on geoengineering and its role in this. I find the traditional ‘greenhouse gases’ angle to be gobbledygook spewed by managerial class types with pronouns in their LinkedIn bios, and I’m tired of alternative ‘activists’ in the space dismissing questions and concerns about geoengineering’s potential negative effects on the environment and redirecting the debate to focus on things like commercial aviation fuel changes as the primary reason for the general white haze most of us see in the sky these days. It’s as if no one knows we can verify that the geoengineering/weather modification industry is very real and very profitable these days.
I recently read a book called “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” which goes deep into its subject matter and is well-sourced. It’s written by James Rodger Fleming, who touts himself as a historian of science and technology, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. So, he at least has all the requisite managerial class credentials to spew scientism word vomit all over the place. To say this practice has been going on for a long time would be both true and false, depending on your definition of what a long time is. It certainly isn’t documented as far back as the Younger Dryas, but the industrial revolution sure does bring about a lot of entrepreneurial spirits who thought it’d be good business to charge people for the weather of their choosing. And that seems to have never stopped.
Truthfully, I have no horse in this race other than I’m not interested in participating in any further societal hoodwinks perpetuated by the robber barons and their managerial class’s useful idiocy. I simply want all bases covered, debated and once-overed again for good measure so those of us who still have some semblance of working natural intelligence and intuition (not me, mind you) can navigate this space appropriately.
Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. I keep thinking of Bucky Fullers notion of the “trim tab” this week, how small self-correcting measures can prevent a person from swinging to binary extremes. I have previously advocated for a post on Wilhelm Reich, and I’d previously advocated for a post on William Blake. So, if I use the trim tab method perhaps I can propose a post on William Reich or Wilhelm Blake? Orgone energy is eternal delight, after all.
So, not being able to decide on what to vote for that might actually win, how about casting an improbable vote for the topic of: How Rube Goldberg’s comical inventions relate to Alfred Jarry’s science of pataphysics and the quest for imaginary solutions.
That oughta do.
Anyone else who cares to, please cast a vote with me.
Thanks for an enlightening discussion of this topic! The existence of monsoon rains in the Sahara has been critical to pushing the creation of the Sphinx back well before the existence of Egyptian Pharaohs and their civilization…As a visiting geologist pointed out, the weathering of the Sphinx is vertical, not horizontal, so it wasn’t caused by wind, it was caused by rain, which didn’t exist in that area, according to current knowledge, after 8-10,000 BC….This suggests the existence of a culture (probably buried by sand) of which we have no knowledge..
“That isn’t the end of the world, but it costs. That’s the real secret of climate change. Think of it as a tax that nature places on all human economic activity.”
Well, quite. In a similar way that national debts are becoming unmanageable, so our natural debt is well into the same territory. All debts come due in time. Mother Nature generally has the last word, not to mention the most persuasive bailiffs.
I’ve been reading your posts for long enough to be nodding the whole way through this one. I live in the “wet west” of Scotland, in a stone-built house up a rise about a mile from one of the rivers that flows into Loch Lomond, which itself empties into the Clyde Estuary. All the climate maps I have seen show that our house will, in time, end up as a bijoux beachfront property on one side and still be far enough (and high enough) to avoid the expanding river on the other. It might have been trickier if the north and west of Britain wasn’t still rising after the last ice age. Depending on the state of the Gulf Stream, the owners might well need to learn to skate and ice fish in the winter, and it could still be wet all the rest of the year. Three of the multiple variables in play. Perhaps they will develop webbing between toes? But more seriously, people here will survive, and I fully expect that adventurous children out in boats will be warned to stay in the channel that was the old road and well away from the lost houses where the lake shore steeply shelves and especially away from the remnants of the drowned woods, even if the fishing is best there. (And they will, naturally, ignore the advice.)
Hi JMG. Thanks for your wisdom and balance as always. Denial used to be my favorite strategy and while I certainly have my blind spots, I appreciate your thought-provoking pieces.
Re: 5th Wednesday, I would appreciate a piece on the big picture of immigration since it’s such a hot button issue here in the US.
Several years ago in my attempt to learn new and useful skills I made a 5 gallon batch of hard apple cider. After the allotted time I bottled it in 750ml Grolsch type bottles and let it age for 6 months. During that time there was still some working going on inside. I decided to open a bottle to taste it at room temperature. What a mess, but a tasty mess. Foam everywhere .
When I refrigerated the next bottle I was prepared , but no mess; just a delicious sparkling drink. I should have known from my Sodastream water carbonator and from my experience trying to raise trout in a pond that occasionally got too warm that cold water dissolves vastly more gases than warm water.
When I would read the argument that CO2 rises occurred after the temperature rose it was apparent to me that the CO2 had been dissolved in the warming oceans and was just coming out of solution. That in itself could cause rapid temperature changes.
@JMG
The question of ancient pre-human industrial civilizations causing some sort of climate change is indeed interesting. This brings me then to the question – could the Permian extinction have been caused partly due to something like this? And of course, this is not in the pre-Cambrian era – who knows what went on then? The geological and paleontological record is a lot more, um, “open to interpretation” as regards that period than it is for the Carboniferous period, for instance. “Snowball Earth” may also have been possibly due to some such thing, who knows?
Regarding climate models, I think we can safely conclude that climate models, or Earth sciences models in general, have only one solid, consistent use: if not anything practical and commercial, they are definitely a great way to learn advanced mathematics. Every other use is probably debatable. As an intellectual exercise, though, they are enjoyable and help build skills – this has been my experience, at least.
As for the remains of our current civilization, it’s essentially Enzymes and Co. which will do the job of “digesting” our synthetic waste products – given enough time (even a million years is small from the POV of deep time), microbes will find ways to digest them.
What was the cause of the sudden increase in temperature around 9600 BC? And a repost pertinent to the subject.
“The needed vast re-engineering of how things are done is mind boggling. I teach an environmental science class to high schoolers. In America we are surrounded by a miasma of anti-life built piece by piece since the 1800’s, in the water, air, soil, food, “medicines”, electromagnetic radiations, what we sit in, live in drive in, walk in, what we wear- plastics and forever chemicals, herbicides, pesticides. The asphalt roads exude chemicals. Human sperm counts have declined by 50% – a canary in the coal mine indicator that something is very wrong! Add to that that a culture and social arrangements that do not promote positive human connections and relationships Yet this death is an intrinsic by product of the present system we use to provide stuff and services! Neither side in the power structure squarely faces and understands the decades long deep restructuring that would have to happen to have a truly healthy society.”
Vote for the matriarchy/patriarchy myth. Here is a snarky warm up, a 90 second comedy riff by a woman on would there really be no war if we had woman leadership
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DLlkV4HJWtg
Madame Albright, first female Secretary of State on the subject
“I’m not a person who thinks the world would be entirely different if it was run by women. If you think that, you’ve forgotten what high school was like.”
Bezos and his wedding, what a deal. 90 private jets flew in.
Did you know his yacht has a dedicated support ship? I didn’t know there was such a thing, but you can’t land a helicopter on a sailboat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht_support_vessel
The support ship is 75 meters, Bezo’s yacht is 127 meters. But since it’s a sailboat it doesn’t count, right? 😉
Alan #10 wrote:
“Aside from a few stories of curious and usually not-well-documented “ooparts” (out-of-place artifacts), I see nothing to suggest the existence of such evidence. Granted, most of our own civilization’s artifacts will almost certainly be rusted, corroded or dissolved after just a few tens of thousands of years, but one would expect SOME evidence to survive, if only buried glass bottles, or the impressions of hardware in shale, or anomalous concentrations of metal oxides from corroded objects.”
Any archeologist finding or reporting such items risks being ridiculed or drummed out of the profession and made unemployable. I suggest reading “The Hidden History of the Human Race: The Condensed Edition of “Forbidden Archeology” by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson – or the longer original version, “Forbidden Archeology”.
If you prefer videos, try this one (unexpectedly introduced by Charlton Heston, but none the worse for that):
The Mysterious Origins of Man (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u__Zm4stnug
and learn about the fate of archeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre.
Admittedly Dr. Michael P. Masters theorises in all seriousness that such artefacts were left there by our human DESCENDANTS (!), who he believes have cracked time travel and are behind many of the supposed UFO close encounters. He calls these supposed time travellers “extratempestrials”. I found his book “The Extratempestrial Model” to be a fascinating read, as he delves into biology and genetics, etc., while pursuing his theories. Did I believe his theories? I’m in two minds, but they made for a great read.
I think it is possible, but not guaranteed, that higher global temperatures will bring back a green Sahara (and Arabia). Greening depends on the monsoon direction and strength, and global warming will not necessarily impact monsoons in the same way that the movements of Earth’s axis do. I do hope you are right!
My vote is on patriarchy / matriarchy. Just recently, I read the stories at the end of The Glass Bead Game for the first time and smiled a bit at Hesse’s (or rather Knecht’s) all-out embrace of the matriarchal myth.
@The Khan: I don’t think the idea is that the Amazon was deforested before 1492, but that a rather large population was supported by living off the products of a largely human-managed forest, dotted by relatively small, highly fertile enclaves of horticulture. The European explorers saw the biggest settlements because they were sailing along the biggest rivers.
I wonder if it is possible to get the carbon isotope proportions from sediments laid down during the Toarcian and Cenomanian-Turonian temperature excursions. Carbon from burning fossilized organic matter is different from volcanic carbon. But of course the events themselves were short on a geological time scale, and it might be hard to find such sediments.
Hi JMG, Michelle here, happy to see you back. As a side note, I’ve been recovering from a mastectomy for breast cancer, and more recently enduring chemotherapy. I don’t love it but neither do I think that a 20% probability of recurrence within 10 years is a risk I’m willing to take, with the future of health care so very unclear.
I’m wondering about whether you’ve contemplated any interruptions to the AMOC in your musings? Is that part-and-parcel of the shifting rain belts in your analysis?
My vote is for the myth(s?) matriarchy/patriarchy. Gerry
i’m in my own messy writing madness and didn’t know you, Papa, would be writing before July 1. i only caught the essay on the meltdown of the laptop class this morning and YES YES YES! that’s The Great Smothering i’m feeling from their tantrums all up and down this coast. ALL small talk is Trump Trump Trump and after riding in a taxi and admitting to the driver before we left my street that i’d voted Trump, and had to ride across town on icy jagged eggshells, i no longer bother. it’s all theatre and bataka bats out here.
as a looney tunes tasmanian devil type artist, i keep looking for the soft spot to press on and help heal, and seeing their ululating caterwauls as not just simple collective tantrums, but losing Everything They Think They Are, thank you. i get it and can now come at it from a place of understanding and sympathy instead of simple irritation, because i went through my own loss of Everything back in 2011 or so, getting ready for the end of the world in 2012. (smile)
that makes a TON of sense because that’s when i did my own Living Suicide and surrendered submitted to James a la Ephesians 5:22 because i’d plum run out of so-called great feministy ideas about my eventual Greatness where it’s all endless Look at Me! Look at ME NOW!
James forced me to carry a flip phone because cops kept getting called on me for dancing whilst the thefts continued unabated at walgreen’s everywhere in town BECAUSE ACTING FREE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN THIEVING. that’s the lesson i keep learning like a painting painted a thousand times.
surrendering submitting to James’ more expansive logical but loving vision of our life together was liberating freeing and changed the meaning of how i read EVERYTHING.
i haven’t changed my approaches to how i undermine the status quo, i only adjust the volume treble and bass for what’s needed at the moment, and i’m trying to figure out how to enunciate the words of what i do and how i do it so that other ferals may attempt their own “guided” adventures. i say “guided” because us emotionals are powerful with DIRECTION. like actors going off the edge and having a grounded director bring them back with a rope tied around his or her waist.
and now with that last essay i can hope to connect with their agonies because i know what it is to die a dozen times already. as a forced funny person (much constant pain forces you to become funny or die inside), i can easily ridicule the snapping sanity, but flushing their heads down toilets are not always the best way to settle things with beloveds you’re forced to live with.
i was looking for the EMPATHY. and now i get why their agonies are so much worse now. everyone’s noticing it but not WHY. the PG&E guy came to read the meters again and for the second time he kept bowing to me saying how KIND and NICE i was as all the customers he deals with in this town are downright mean to him. i said, “really?” because i thought it was just me and my PTSD after all they did to James and me.
nope. we’ve got an entire are aof rich people losing their not-cotton-picking minds because they’re afraid of become uber and lyft drivers like everyone else delivering food and cheap amazon last-mile crap. yup. that’s what i feared and then i went onto craigslist looking for crappy jobs that wanted me to learn CPR to walk dogs or buy a magic phone to wipe old people’s butts so i could clock in and be monitored.
i ululated alone and went mad but eventually “sane” enough once i was out of that collective agreement to not mention the DISSONANCE, and was able to read minds again and feel energy like when i was a runaway little girl surviving and protecting my hymen with deep eye contact intuition and some of those looney tune tasmanian devil moves to keep monsters at bay, so that’s my beat. my corner. pulling the thread that unravels what’s left of their fake blood-thirsty decorum so that i may see what’s behind it.
okay. i’ll read the rest of the article. i was just sooo excited by these secret essay i had no idea was even up.
oh, to all regarding the evolving Adocentyn concept:
Peter Van Erp is bringing me out to next year’s Ecosophian Potluck. i had no one to watch the kitties and i have a MegaZine to finish (a zine that is perfect bound and printed in the U.S. in Pennsauken near where my mom worked and i was from in Cherry Hill and went to the group home in Camden).
without being Devouring Mother, i’m trying to entice him into letting us do a story telling bonfire type of picnic because it’s my circuitous way of sitting at Papa G’s feet when he closes the show and talks and takes questions from the nibbling audience. can’t you just SEE it???
like an impromptu talent show of whatever ending with Papa propped up in front of us with a cold stout (or warm, depending on how he likes it) and a comfortable chair.
i want to show how easy it is. i’ve been putting stuff like this on since i was a little kid jumping on my bed to 45s and it’s soooo fun to see people as stars for a moment.
i’ll produce it! i’ll wipe people’s sweat off their brows and set up the scene!
i’m so excited about everyone meeting in the UK and even the scared people feeling like “oh! that was quite pleasant!”
yes. we are heaven here on earth, too. we just keep forgetting! i’ll remind.
x
VOTING ON YOU WRITING ABOUT MATRIARCHY-NOT-PATRIARCHY WE LIVE IN.
I vote for the false patriarchy/matriarchy conflict.
In my teenage years in the 1990s, I used to say, “All resources are nonrenewable if you do not renew them.” I was also against letting China into the WTO because that would be catastrophic to the environment since, ya know, we’re all on the same planet, but a lot of people forget that.
I think it’s why a lot of people on the right have deluded themselves into thinking humans cannot possibly be causing climate change. Since so much of the factories have been offshored, you no longer see nor smell the smokestack-filled cityscapes in the United States like you used to. Having grown up a few miles away from one such cityscape in Detroit, it’s impossible to see the scale of that and believe it’s not having an effect on our climate.
In my limited experience, right-wingers now know the weather/climate is getting more chaotic, whether they blame it on greenhouse gas emissions, God’s will, or a New World Order government conspiracy.
I don’t know what leftists think, because I don’t know that many of them in meatspace and it’s taboo to question the official climate change narrative in online left spaces & the mainstream media.
For the Fifth Wednesday post, I vote for your take on masculinity/femininity because it will likely be more interesting and accurate than the feminist or manosphere narratives.
So what you’re saying is “embrace the power of and?”
That is, things are always far more complex than we’d like.
We really aren’t as smart as we like to think our species is. God knows I see this all around me.
I love watching my sister, the world-traveler, complain about climate change!
So the crisis is more revolving around resource depletion than climate change itself in the long run? What about the argument that some people like to use about how whale blubber was used as a vital resource until something better (fossil fuels) replaced it and so there’s no need to worry about resource depletion as substitutes can always be found?
I think a post about patriarchy and matriarchy would be very fitting given the state of things between men and women in (American) society. Maybe how oppression/stratification based on sex both compares and contrasts with oppression/stratification based on race/ethnicity or religion. And maybe also touching on the definition of such terms would also be interesting, as the dictionary definitions of patriarchy and matriarchy are not (last I checked) the definitions used by (Western) feminists, as there is heavy dispute about whether the Scandinavian countries can really be classed as patriarchies or not and if the definitions are used for political purposes or if they indicate a more complex reality than a dictionary can provide.
Whatever the post is, as always, I’m looking forward to it!
and regarding societal permission, i totally agree, and that’s at the heart of my question:
WHAT ARE PEOPLE GETTING OUT OF LEAVING THINGS THIS WAY???
ever since i was young i wondered why the ones in power ever cared what the little people thought in the first place if they were so omnipotent, while the little people felt disempowered.
my ETERNAL OPTIMISM (even when i’m despairing) comes from my own ability as the feral monster girl to upend any situation just by asking the one question no one dare or say what’s obvious that people ignore.
it doesn’t take MUCH.
the question for me as an artist (as a VERB), is: “how do we tip the culture in favor of the exhibitionists who’re so past caring about being surveilled and shamed because they’ve got nothing left to lose???”
there are cameras everywhere. EVERYWHERE. san francisco i finally realized cannot come back with all of them. they’re ubiquitous. as are beeping sounds and automatic sensory lights going off all night.
okay. i’m way off topic. i was reading the comments.
(smile)
e
For the 5th Wednesday post I propose a tour d’horizon (a necessarily brief tour) of the major occultists of the 20th Century and their impact on the modern world.
A common staple of many mystery & occult themed sites is mention that Aleister Crowley irresponsibly failed to properly seal a gate to other realms during his workings in the North African desert allowing malefic influences to come into our world. Same with Jack Parson’s Babylon workings in his Pasadena desert At the very least, the sheer amount of cringe references to Crowley, call outs and larping prevalent in popular culture colors the modern atmosphere.
The more I read on Dion Fortune, the more I believe she had a solid agenda that went far beyond the day to day politics she warned members of her society against. I feel she’s also responsible (or deserves credit, depending on one’s point of view) for how some things turned out. On the other hand, someone like W.B. Yeats may have had some very subtle influences, not generally known.
I’d like to point out that the biggest daner of climate change isn’t the direction it’s going, or even the trillions of dollars of sunk costs in modern infrastructure, it’s the instability and uncertainty.
A warmer planet with more rainfall could be a paradise that supports much more life, both human and nonhuman. We built climate appropriate buildings, extensive roads and canals, granaries, monuments, etc. before fosil fuels and we will doubtless do so again after they are gone. The climate will eventually stabilize at some new equilibrium with new deserts and rainforests, but in the transition planning will be very difficult. Modern agricultural plains may become a desert, but for years it will just look like a severe drought. Massive flooding will eventually become wetlands and rainforests, but to those on the ground it just looks like a natural disaster. And those are just the ones that are following a clear trendline to a clear destination. There could very easily be stark changes in ocean currents that would completely change the neighboring climate and Hadley cells merging from 3 per hemisphere to 1 per hemisphere is going to upset a lot of apple carts should it come to pass.
Some places, like say the midwest, could just get steadily drier until it’s unambiguously a desert. But others could be whipsawed back and forth when, say, a drying trend is abruptly reversed by a change in ocean currents, then revert to a drying trend only to be undone by merged Hadley cells. Such a place might start out and end up as a pretty pleasant place for human habitation, but in the centuries in between it could be awfully ugly.
For the 5th Wednesday, I’d like to hear about miscalculation in an age of hubris. The US clearly miscalculated when it provoked Russia into invading Ukraine and Israel appears to have miscalculated when it attacked Iran. In both cases, the established power overestimated its capacities and underestimated its rivals. I have a feeling that there is going to be a lot more of that in store. The combination of a declining power and rising rivals, and the arrogance, delusions, and military weakness of the west seems like fertile territory for some devestating miscalculations. Now, I understand that times like ours are highly contingent, so I’m not looking for detailed predictions, but some historical perspective into the dynamics would be nice.
(thanks, Vitranc!)
–erika
“THE BIG BLOBBY BILL”!!!!!
man that’s soooo good it HURTS.
an example of the “managerial class” interfering with climate change narratives:
“Millán’s study was initially well received. He was invited by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to contribute to its Third Assessment Report in 2002. But that was also a time when climate scientists — who built models based on projections of increased global carbon emissions and rising temperatures — were becoming dominant.
Millán found that the modelers were not interested in his analysis of interacting factors and “questioned every result we presented.” He found himself involved in endless losing arguments and eventually left the IPCC.
Politicians, it seemed, also preferred the modelers’ straightforward analysis to Millán’s complex accounting.”
https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-narratives?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1604432&post_id=160791979&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6q9vp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Mary, her stuff is considered bit outdated now, even what she wrote about indoeuropans, though she was still more right than Renfrew. Right now, archeologist tend to think neolithic societies weren’t matriarchal(they tended to be partilocal and patrilineal) and that they weren’t all that peaceful e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Schletz
I think you’re not being fair to renewables. Your chart reflects the emissions made so far. However the growth has been pretty impressive, it looks like even China’s emissions have stopped growing https://www.newscientist.com/article/2480289-chinas-co2-emissions-have-started-falling-is-this-finally-the-peak/
Mind you, this doesn’t mean that we’ll avoid the effects you’ve described, they are mostly baked in.
Do you have any sources of information on paleoclimatology that you recommend? Considering the vast amount of speculation involved in anything written about the past, are there any sources that you recommend NOT reading?
5th Wednesday vote: Population decline – historic examples, foreseeable economic, ecologic and societal impacts.
As usual, JMG, your take on a hot-button topic is sufficiently nuanced and reasonable to be a breath of fresh air. Thank you.
As for 5th Wednesday, I’d also like to vote for the matriarchy / patriarchy myth post.
Re: biology vs. culture:
I suspect human societies can be compared to an outside dog tied to a pole on a long chain. The dog can wander about through the radius but cannot go beyond it. At the edge of the territory, the dog gets choked by the chain and doesn’t like to go out that far except when reacting to some animal or unfamiliar person. And the dog wanders all over the territory (no long-term “moral progress” for societies) but keeps going back and staying in certain spots like the doghouse, the shade under the tree, water hole, and food bowls (some cultures are more stable than others).
In short, the biological foundation of human nature sets limits on the range of feasible societies.
I think more people would agree with this position, if not for moral progressivism demanding we keep moving “forward.”
The only way wind and solar work is with subsidies, as I think you need an EROEI of above 12:1 for anything to even remotely pay for itself. I really need to get my review of the great solar EROEI debate online, but I find it fascinating that in the last 10 years, some formerly conservative thinkers on renewable energy have adopted radical new methodologies for calculating solar PV EROEI, often using pay walled data that can’t be easily replicated. These calculations are designed as boosterism, pushing solar PV EROEI above 20:1, but I think in time will be seen as nothing other than false advertising. Charles Hall, now well into his 80s, is sitting there writing what he can with a sort of sad resignation. Solar PV is probably well below 10:1.
So either the subsidies are from existing generation, usually coal, sometimes nuclear and hydro, or financial subsidies, which in ultimately means energy backing.
The CEO of a major New Zealand electricity company (hydro and wind, plus solar) recently annoyed our climate activists by stating that home scale solar doesn’t make sense. He’s right. He did say that grid scale solar makes sense in New Zealand, but only because NZ is lucky to have hydro. It doesn’t solve the issue NZ, like all electricity grids (apart from Norway) face, what happens in substantial droughts when the hydro lakes run out?
The solution is, as in almost all places, burn coal.
Dear JMG,
Great essay. I wonder if it’s ever occurred to you that climate modeling is much like sham divination? The models – beyond comprehension of all but a few and certainly not to the politicians who base policy on them – build their outputs on layer upon layer of assumption to predict futures which may or may not be true. I noticed that recently you’d said AI could well be a vehicle for unknown, unseen forces and given that climate models are similar in technology, this might be the case here too.
Kindly,
Boy
For those who aren’t familiar with Fahrenheit, a change of 15 degrees F is equivalent to a 27 degree C change (multiply by 9 and divide by 5).
My fifth Wednesday vote is for gnosticism.
Hi JMG,
Great post as always! It’s so nice to have someone really “get it.” I have friends on both the right and left who deploy the exact arguments you talk about. I’ve been telling my left-leaning friend that the people running the COP organization are not our friends and he looks at me like I’ve grown a third eye, while my friend on the right says that I’ve “drunk the cool-aide” and am under the influence of “left-wing propogandists” for saying that climate change is really a thing. So, I absolutely understand your commenter’s statement about the right being in denial and the left being in delusion.
The only positive thing I will note here is that I’ve seen some people in the climate change crowd begin to recognize that what they are doing is counterproductive. I’ve seen some individuals begin to reduce their own footprint; taking trains instead of planes whenever possible, reducing the amount of stuff they buy, etc. I’ve also noticed what I interpret as the first tentative stages of grass-roots organizing to get ready for the negative effects of climate change. For example, my friend Emily Schoerning’s YouTube channel “American Resiliency” (here: https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanResiliency) is trying to do some of that by providing “actionable” information for people to help them understand what is going on in their region and things they can do to prepare for themselves and their families.
Finally, I want to cast my vote for the “Manufactured Patriarchy/Matriarchy myth’ topic for the fifth Wednesday post. Thanks again!
Not only is the concept of deep time unfathomable to modern people, historical time has been rapidly narrowed to the point that most people can’t conceive of anything outside their lived experience, and a world viewed throught the narrow lense provided by their particular place in time. I think that’s why the societal/biological question raised so many proverbial hackles.
Most corporations/people (same thing by law) don’t think any farther ahead than the next quarterly earnings statement/paycheck. What planning there is depends on how good the pay period was. If earnings don’t rise, then find someone to blame and double down. If earnings rise, then find something/someone to exploit, and qudruple down. After all, if we are successful, it’s because we deserve it. It’s our biological destiny!
People have no concept of how tiny a blip on the timescale we are. I have no trouble believing your proposition of the previous intelligent/technological societies. That’s one of the ideas I dug out of Stars Reach, humans inability to concieve of life forms that are different than us, due to the particular elements of their circumstances and ecology.
I would like you to chew on the identity politics fallacy that is corroding discourse and problem solving. It seems to be the larger issue that contains the matriarchy/patriarchy debate. It’s like the “biblical view of marriage” trope popular amongst pundits both left and right. The reality is that there are myriad ways of arranging families/tribes/societies. Does it always end in war?
@60 KAN
No, it’s an 8°C change. Multiply by 5 and divide by 9 to convert to Celsius, the other way around to convert to Fahrenheit. Celsius units are larger than Fahrenheit units.
First off, I’ve got everyone’s votes tabulated — thank you.
Mary, thank you. Er, not all influencers are bought and paid for by the elite classes; I have a fairly large following online, for example, and I’ve yet to have anyone offer me money to pitch some point of view. No doubt there are many others like me. As for continental drift, well, mammals are found on every continent but Antarctica these days, you know; different continents had different dinosaur fauna, so they weren’t as closely connected as that.
David, yes, I read about the Fugu Plan in a book many decades ago. It was a very Japanese sort of misunderstanding of the West.
Polecat, you know, I think that analysis is at least as good as the official ones. As for magnetic poles, yes, we’re probably not far from a pole reversal, or at least an excursion (the term for a temporary wobbling of the geomagnetic field), but I know of no solid evidence that that’ll mess with the climate.
RaabSilco, thank you! You’re quite right that the current climate follies repeat a standard pattern, and it’s one I’ve been brooding about of late; if I come up with some useful ways of looking at the pattern, an essay will be forthcoming.
Clay, of course. Every civilization in its decadence comes up with grandiose projects to waste resources that might otherwise save it from its fate; data centers are our contribution to that grand old pattern.
Vitranc, very often it’s all that we can do.
Pygmycory, exactly. The planet will be fine; our species will be fine; the dangers are far more direct and personal — but that’s exactly what most people don’t want to deal with, as responding to that would require them to (I’ll whisper it) change their lifestyles.
Mister N, one of these days I need to do a post on the complicated nature of power in a mature society. It’s a massive oversimplification to say that there’s just one “ruling class” — in reality there are a great many power centers of varying degrees of strength, and class is only one of many axes along which those are aligned. Factions derived from the old capitalist class still retain some of the power they had before 1929, and the managerial class has been using them as a rhetorical punching bag ever since — “don’t look at us, look at those evil capitalists over there, they’re the real ruling elite!” Look at the way that power has migrated away from boards of directors (which represent stockholders) to C-suites (which represent corporate bureaucracies), and from Congress to the executive branch (same distinction), and you can see how power is really distributed.
Drhooves, it’s not just that it was badly marketed — it’s that it has been used as a way to distract attention from other, frankly more serious issues.
Ryan, geoengineering certainly happens but I’m far from sure that it’s that big a contributor to the situation. No geoengineering project is well enough funded to equal the output of the world’s smokestacks and tailpipes, after all! That said, thanks for the reference — I’ll see if my local library has a copy.
Justin, er, I don’t encourage or welcome attempts to manipulate the voting here, whether by pataphysical methods or otherwise. Please either nominate something you actually want to hear about, vote for something already nominated, or sit this one out.
Pyrrhus, yep. I forget which pharaoh set up a memorial stone saying that he’d found the Sphinx almost entirely buried by the sands of centuries, and had his people excavate and repair it — that is to say, it was already profoundly ancient when the pharaohs reigned.
Serinde, glad to hear it. Whether your descendants go ice fishing, or lounge on a semitropical beach, is a good question, and not just because of the Gulf Stream; under the planet’s normal climate conditions, the poles are temperate…
https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
…though, as a descendant of Scots Highlanders, I shake my head and laugh at the collision between semitropical climates and the Scots national character!
Hermit, yes, that could also have quite an effect! Climate change is even more complex than brewing cider…
Viduraawakened, I don’t think the Permian mass extinction is a likely candidate because it lasted so long. To judge from the current example, a climate crisis caused by intelligent beings digging up a lot of fossil fuels and burning them is a quick, self-terminating process a few centuries long, with knock-on effects on the order of a million years at most. Precambrian examples are unlikely because you need complex multicellular organisms, and those hadn’t evolved yet. That’s why I see the Toarcian and Cenomanian-Turonian events as the most likely candidates: they were sudden, relatively quickly over, and took place long after Earth had evolved complex multicellular organisms with grasping hands and binocular vision.
BeardTree, there are theories, but nobody knows for sure yet. As for “needed re-engineering,” er, it won’t happen. What will happen instead is that we and nature will muddle through. There has never been a “truly healthy society” and never will be, not least because we have no clear idea of what such a society would be like — all we have are our culturally determined and profoundly fallible beliefs about what it would be.
Siliconguy, yep. You can see from that just how much Bezos actually cares about global warming.
(Batstrel, thanks for this.)
Aldarion, well, there were certainly monsoon rains in both places in the Hypsithermal, when the Earth’s axis was in much the same place as it is now, so I think their renewal is pretty likely. As for carbon samples, I don’t know — it’s an intriguing question.
Michelle, please accept my sympathy and good wishes for a complete recovery! As for the AMOC, that and the other overturning circulations will very likely shut down at least for a while — that’s one of the ways the biosphere responds to excess carbon in the atmosphere. (Once the overturning circulations shut down, the deep waters become deoxygenated, and the constant rain of biological material that drifts down there is entombed in sediment, removing its carbon from the biosphere. Curiously enough, that’s where petroleum comes from.)
Erika, glad you liked it! That’s exactly it — the people who are melting down about Trumpety-Trump-Trump-TRUMP!!! these days are suffering a really serious crisis of identity and meaning. I’ll look forward to seeing you next June; as for the campfire et al., I wonder if maybe it’s time to do something in Providence like the event in Glastonbury, with three days or so of talks and time to hang out. If a venue for 50-100 people could be found, that would do it.
Dennis, and you were quite correct, of course, and equally so about the “out of sight, out of mind” effect, which also influences people on the left — think of all the people who insist their electric cars don’t pollute, without ever wondering how the electricity is generated!
Patrick, glad to hear it. I’ve had people from the right deny it to my face.
Teresa, exactly. The universe is too complex for our brains to comprehend. Once we grasp that, it becomes easier to work within our limits.
Dave, resource depletion and environmental disruption are the two poles around which the whole business revolves. As for the whale oil fallacy, imagine that you’re stranded in the desert without water. If I tell you, “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll surely find a substitute for water!” will that do any good? Of course not. There isn’t always a substitute available…
Erika, if I had an answer to that I’d be much further ahead of the game than I am!
Team10tim, a valid and important point!
Cushla, thanks for this! It’s a great example.
Alex, no, I’m being entirely fair to renewables. China’s emissions have stopped growing — no surprises there, since their population is decreasing and so is their industrial production — but that just means they’re adding to the atmospheric CO2 levels at a huge but steady rate instead of a rising one. Meanwhile industrializing nations elsewhere in the global south are increasing their emissions as they produce more goods for the global north. The great secret is that it doesn’t matter how fast renewable growth is, because those PV panels and wind turbines are all manufactured using fossil fuels, using raw materials mined, shipped, refined, and processed using fossil fuels, and are then shipped, installed, maintained, and discarded using fossil fuels. They yield a modest trickle of “green” grid power at a huge cost in pollution and ecosystem damage.
K.A., I’ve been collecting research papers on the subject for years. Online article repositories such as academia.edu are good places to start, and some of the general science mags routinely have articles on the subject; avoid anything that uses the phrase “global warming,” and get multiple sources on any claim before you believe it.
Adara9, you’re welcome and thank you.
Peter, exactly. I see grid-scale wind and solar as being a sort of faux-green equivalent of Tibetan prayer wheels — you do them to gain virtue, not for any more practical benefit.
Boy, hmm! That strikes me as a plausible analysis.
KAN, no, it’s the other way around — remember that there are 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water in Celsius, but 180 in Fahrenheit. A change of 15°F is a little over 8°C.
Chronojourner, I’m delighted to hear this! Since teaching by example is the only thing that actually works in such situations, this might actually help.
John, oh dear gods, yes. I’ve seen this at work so often that I plan on a post about the utter blindness to historical change sometime very soon. As for “identity politics,” that probably deserves a post of its own, too, since — ahem — identity is also a social construct, not a biological one. No, it doesn’t always end in war, but that happens too often for comfort.
Patrick, that metaphor works.
I vote for matriarchy/patriarchy.
please forgive the madness. i am a writer of the kind that is 180 degrees from Papa’s level of focus and chill just scroll past this if he puts this through:
full disclosure because that’s what the rest of my life will be about as i share HOW THIS ARTIST SEES THE WORLD, going off on James’ Baldwin’s quote regarding artists showing you how to see, and he himself was no slouch regarding VISION. oh, hardly.
Jesus’ example of Love is the throughline. and i don’t say Jesus in this context with the generality of “blah blah Ginger.” i am riffing off Papa G’s line a long time ago, just a seeming throwaway answer probably in the comment answers, yes it WAS… something about how Jesus is how living that philosophy would look in the flesh. something like that.
and i was electrified because he exalted that manifestation almost as part of a bigger DIRECTION. ah! writer i am NOT! i’m grasping for words with a spastic club foot. i was electrified because it was matter-of-fact, yeah, you like the idea of polytheism because no one has to be WRONG… THAT in itself IS the proverbial finger pointing to the MOON and becoming said MOON.
ya dig?
it’s not abstract, it’s in the questions assumptions… which is why he says societal not biological permission given regarding what we’ve got now… and STILL it can be interpreted a myriad of WAYS! how highlarious and how Biblical or any religion’s form of LOVE always inevitably turns into axxhole fxck you slaughter.
it would be so highlarious if it weren’t so NOW.
back to…
so why write when you think everyone knows you and STILL it gets taken for the opposite? because it starts a CONVERSATION and this is where the meat is and why i write here to say where we have to go. we question our assumptions. how far WE’LL go while chastising others for backing down. we have no shared language or even VISION. so the artist writer philosopher who dares to put their ideas down not only risk ridicule but they risk their language being of a totally alien construct compared to SOCIETY.
i’m also riffing off an article i was killing writing time with oh, the one CJ Hopkins just mentioned in his openly capitalistic plea that we buy his book. the one on how publishing now needs series and “comp” books… books eternally “compared to” and it molds THINKING.
it builds its own machine platform.
that is what we’re fighting. all the fancy words are often wasted rose petals dried up and swept out …maybe they become potpurri LATER but i’m riding on i’ve BEEN SAVED! Jesus-type near life epiphanies that you are SEEN and thus loved (to hearken to Eugene Terekhin’s work that is ALSO like a director’s voice i hear alongside my descent into the depths of our collective madness so that i may see…
WHAT DO WE OURSELVES GET OUT OF LIFE BEING THIS WAY BECAUSE WE WE WE US ALLOW IT
so i must find out what is REALLY being fed. what makes MKULtra work on ALL of us like those slave tenets about keeping the light skinned ones apart from the dark skinned ones… it’s read like HISTORY but i hear it as NOW NOW NOW like fingernails on a chalkboard. even if the willie lynch speech about how to keep the slaves enslaved by pitting them against each other, no matter: IT WORKS NOW. it’s us NOW.
so if LIFE is so good, why do we have such a hard time pitching it to an even worse reality? if we’re the power? if we keep kings in their place?
to go back to The Bible where God hopes we don’t NEED KINGS. even if The Bible was written by Bazooka gum cartoonists, it’s a GREAT IDEA.
so if people think so but can only go so far in our world but “we” run things? we’re back to Ursula LeGuin’s pitch about the artist being treasonous for going along.
so that’s why i’m trying to gather the ones who have nothing to lose the ones ready for The Living Suicide to show LOVE as a verb but how to sidestep pretentiousness art and action and leading and healing can so easily slip into? (again our platforms are heirarchy even here in Papa G’s land. i can show you how i’d happily bow at his feet in public and not resemble anything like a dormant sack of potatoes regardless of how fat my ass may be. i, an artist can SHOW you)
not to piss off that Englishman who hated parenthetical statements but loved it enough because it inspired him to write it TINGLED him. could you not FEEL it? how to channel those tingles into another non English platform that IS American? but not to piss you off, sir, but i’ve lost control of my own parenthesis entirely and if i look for it i’ll be horrified at what i’ve written here but i’ve sliced a vein to even GET to this place so i must at least cut and paste for my own clarity (it’s easier to be clear to an actual friendly audience than to myself and an imaginary one. i flounder.)
…meaning we also ceded our AMERICAN rag tag culture to the ones who LOOOVE watching Downton. Abbey. James said liberals were loyalists. he pointed to PBS’s love of shows on royalty.
Johnny Appleseed and Muddy Waters come ON, you all! different platform. where are the hillbillies???
that’s why JD Vance was everywhere in every meme. because Hillbilly’s coming back. i’m not creating anything, just pointing out the new syllables emerging underground because my own life depends on reconnecting with them.
see you next year at Adocentyn.
Thanks much, Mr Peter Van Erp. he made a toast into REALITY.
see how it works? don’t waste your time writing tingly jabs about format and fake composure. America’s where the words got all jumbled up and we still apparently have to read body language to get along.
move the tingles to the kind of love where we make each other and then it ripples. like so many here have done with me, us moving it to the REAL world, warts hugs love and all.
love is messy irritating annoying and sometimes HELL if you’re doing it right, RIGHT? if you’ve ever been in the kind of relationship that’s not torture, you KNOW. it’s better than this all THIS around us.
so we’re gonna have to figure out how to get along. that’s my take on Jesus. we may not get to the ecstatic woo woo love part where you say “power money whaaaa?..” because it’s irrelevant. an unholy waste of time.
Peter Van Erp’s offer of bringing me to Adocentyn next year is making me think of MY gift to bring, even as i’ll be traveling and have no kitchen i’m going to take over. and my gift is to produce our own little talent show to show each other our selves and show how EASY and fun it is to go back to playing outside til the streetlights come on.
that’s MY gift i want to offer.
so i’m being Devouring Mother underhanded in trying to publicly sandbag dear Mr Patient non-answering non-committal Peter Van Erp because i want to try and solicit EVERYONE else’s encouragement that they have a song to sing a poem to read a theory to openly share for tearing apart… the CONVERSATIONS. such things are like brand new tiny black box theatre.
as an exhibitionist who’s one because i simply no longer CARE what boring tedious people think of me unless they’re actively trying to kill me which isn’t out of the realm of possibility these endless days of san francisco misery and rage and fear, i’m trying to bring out the exhibitionists in the best of YOU because you all are away of the powers of ego fame and the traps that kill all good intentions.
like Eugene Terekhin’s LATEST (i told you he runs alongside where art is going… out into the WORLD. i’m convinced of it), anyhow like his latest post, it’s about how and why some don’t fall prey to the soft spoken satans of the world, because they don’t want anything. they’re not idol worshipping.
when you take people out of it, The Bible’s got amazing lessons and secrets and tips in there.
again, i think you have to read “alongside” it. another platform or language. and even then i believe we’ll still misunderstand. but that’s where the BEST art and conversations come in.
so i’m reminding us the misunderstandings are the beauty the meat the best parts of the marriage or connection that keeps us stronger because we’re endlessly fascinating to each other instead of the devouring mother or even that roman way Simon Sheridan (MUST READ HIS WORK ON DEVOURING MOTHER!!!!) reminds me is about this binary kukla fran and ollie shtick.
it’s tedious boring and UNNECESSARY.
if our way’s better {(not to be “dxcks”–[yes, ducks]) this is for YOU, English man who ignores parenthesis.. tingle away!} then why do we keep losing the sale???
we must be ruthless with our answers. i don’t have them, i’m challenging our THINKING the architecture of how we come to our interpretations and assumptions about words.
i’m a writer so words elude me (smile).
if the evil have more time and money while we’re off enjoying hikes or having good sex, we have to think smarter. BE smarter.
i believe this because without James to buffer me from The Real World, i keep saying to myself by what i see and feel now that i wasn’t in my own art world: YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.
so i’m coming clean about my ways of thinking my trying to use my manipulative powers for collective GOOD by getting you all to be into starting Adocentyn’s road show at Peter Van Erp’s potluck next year on 20th of June 2026.
i bury the lead because if you got this far down you GET this. you can’t look away because it’s in YOU. i’m a rorschach test. how you respond tells me the world about you before hello.
i’m sharing how i do this. surrender is saying yes to Jim Moore’s gift and dare as well as Peter Van Erp’s. give me something to RIFF off with my talents and it changes MY life and yours. it’s an offering and accepting for me takes much thought because every YES is a new adventure when you surrender your ideas and come with your gifts and your all.
it ups the date energy. you don’t need to “fall in love” because EVERY INTERACTION has that potential.
it gives back. it lifts up. it’s a different paradigm than feminist’s give me i want to be exalted! adore me! rape me! then bow before me!
what’s in it for The Other Beloved???
and you’re SAVED if they think surrender and submit IN THAT CONTEXT means “bend over, bxtch.”
you realize it doesn’t FEEL GOOD. that’s how you see the devils. THEY DON’T FEEL GOOD.
that’s why this feels like hedonism so then why is hedonism bad???
again… upside down world. Satan shows up as an enlightened being. fascinating!
artists… yes. we WILL teach you how to see. but artists means something different to EVERYONE, including me, and i say …
GOOD!
the creativity comes in the trying to eternally EXPLAIN. god/God is in the misunderstandings and mistakes.
no. AI cannot touch this.
whew. gotta go write. i’m gonna steal all this and edit it down. i missed this place. hard to write to yourself and so much clearer writing in THIS place, THIS audience who gets what i’m on about. some of you at least.
the ones who made it this far, next year in Adocentyn!
x
@erika
Milady
V
I was just trying to have some fun in my own way, by, I thought, being silly. I wasnt intending to actually manipulate anyone. I guess it might not have come across that way.
(I thought voting fraud was as American as apple pie, though?)
How about this nomination along the lines of Goldberg & Jarry: The Imagination as a Source for Strategies in Coping with the Polycrisis.
My vote is for “Manufactured Patriarchy/Matriarchy myth”
Thank you for your reply, JMG.
I have been meditating on deep time a fair amount, trying to stretch my minds eye to slow down its view of the passage of time. I am trying this in the hopes that I can see things on a deeper level than the surface view that we have in day to day life. It’s hard, because I see things through a human lense, and that is a very immediate thing. I want to listen to what the plants have to say!
I cast my 5th Wednesday vote for the Patriarchal/Matriarchal topic then, and look forward to your unpacking of the identity politics racket.
Thank you also, for collecting and shepherding, the best commentariat around. I don’t know how you do it. Thoughtful replies to thoughtful comments. Perhaps we are a fringe community, but it gives me so much hope for humanity.
What’s the eventual fate of the Canadian prairie states like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba?
@JMG: LOL. Be assured, the Scots are extremely adaptable and are known and welcomed around the world as good natured and open-handed, even when in their cups, in part because other cultures see them as the prototype colony on which their own experience was built, so there is a certain fellow feeling, despite their time as the civil servants and soldiers of empire. Back in the last century when I travelled a bit, I always told people the truth when they asked where I lived (even when I knew they meant where was I from): Scotland. I was always made very welcome indeed (one Anglo accent being very like another, mercifully; never admit being an American if it could be avoided was my motto). The Scots love warmer climes — and the diaspora can be found in all manner of interesting places, many of them semi-tropical, so if all that comes to them — even better! Wish I could hear how traditional stories adapt. What they don’t yet realise is there are worse critters (just) than midges!
May I put a vote in for an exploration of hubris and over-reach? (Although anything will be interesting, as usual.)
I vote for the patriarchy/matriarchy topic that everyone here seems to be onboard with, but with one caveat: please devote a good portion of it to the issues that young men specifically face today with regard to the fact that the education system and pop culture tells them that they are basically useless. How will this play out? Will there be a backlash to this? (perhaps you could also address how Freemasonry offers a potential antidote to these issues?)
What could survive from a previous civilization is a good question. Shark teeth survived in sedimentary rock after all. Ceramics should as well.
As for metals, something like a stainless steel pump housing should hold up. At least some stainless steels, type 304 is barely stainless and would crumble in any brine. But the higher chrome alloys could well survive. Something like Alloy 20 used in sulfuric acid service is likely to survive. Then there are extremely corrosion resistant alloys like 825 or inconel 600 and the top of the line (and expensive) C-276.
A geologically quiet sedimentary basin has the best odds of surviving artifacts. Once you add the heat and pressure from a metamorphic process everything ends up an oxide or sulfide and the shapes would be deformed as well.
So you would need to find the thin layer corresponding to the (geologically) short lived civilization. Hard, but not impossible. They did find the Tanis site after all. But you need to know exactly what time frame you are looking for and be very lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site)
“Enjoyer, exactly. If the Jews were actually the sort of all-powerful world-controlling force that anti-Semites believe they are, that would clearly show that they were a superior race — certainly superior to the anti-Semites! ”
I really, really hate to have to play advocate for this devil, but I think both you and Ecosophia Enjoyer are strawmanning the antisemetic position. Propaganda, of course, doesn’t have to be internally consistent– it’s meant to convince your emotions, not your intellect– but there has been an intellectual strain of that racialist antisemetism, and their view actually does have some consistency. It is that “The Jews” (though more specifically, the Ashkenazim, since European antisemites rarely made note of Sephardim after 1492, and the Mizrahim’s existence is inconvenient to this thesis)* serve the ecological role of parasites. They are superior in certain specific traits (modern race realists admit to very high IQ, but an antisemite might want to downplay it as “low cunning”), but deficient in others in order to adapt them to that role. This parasitism does lead to them assisting one another to take positions in high society, but to the benefit of their own group and the detriment of the host nation. A parasite might have power over the host, but is it superior?
I am not saying this to endorse this viewpoint. By no means! I would like to see it disproven and dispelled in its strongest and virulant form, because I think that when you strawman the position you actually strengthen it when encountered in the wild. The way everything the regime doesn’t like is called Nazi and everything the Israelis don’t like is called Antisemitism has lifted those ideas out of the dustbin of history. If all you ever hear is a caricature of them, if you run into a real, erudite Antisemite or National Socialist, you won’t have the intellectual tools to argue. When he sounds much more reasonable than you expect, you can be taken unawares–and that weakens you to his spell. Aside from my own nearly pathological sense of fairness leading me to speak up, “know thy enemy” is an important adage for a reason.
(I’d also like to point out that most of the self-identifying “race realists” are not exactly Nazis and, indeed, the high average IQ of Ashkenazim is a key talking point for such folks. To be generous to the “race realist” position, it is entirely possible to acknowledge difference without asserting superiority. (They kind of have to: most of them are white, and whites are middling at everything by “The Bell Curve” style data.))
*(actually, at least one antisemite has used the relationship between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as evidence of this “Ashkenazim=Parasites” thesis with the specific focus on Ashkenazim, the demographic makeup of Israeli elites being what it is.)
My vote for 5th Friday is Gnosticism
Thanks as always
“There has never been a “truly healthy society” and never will be, not least because we have no clear idea of what such a society would be like — all we have are our culturally determined and profoundly fallible beliefs about what it would be.”
You know, this has really been brought home to me in the last couple years since we had kids. We put a lot of thought and effort into providing them with the healthiest possible environment, but even very deeply held and well-considered convictions about what that actually is have had some dismaying collisions with the realities of life, personality differences, and resource constraints (and not always the obvious resources!). I think we do all right, but it certainly requires a decent amount of agility and equanimity to pull it off.
On an encouraging note, most conservatives I know are entirely receptive to straightforward concerns about toxic pollution, although most are allergic to carbon boondoggles and highly suspicious of “endangered species” initiatives (about which I have mixed feelings myself). Most of the farmers, hunters, and fishermen are also entirely aware of climate change, as well, although changes in our subtropical region may be more obvious than most (tropical fish moving in, flatly too warm to cure hams anymore most years, etc.).
>For those who aren’t familiar with Fahrenheit, a change of 15 degrees F is equivalent to a 27 degree C change (multiply by 9 and divide by 5).
Ahem, methinks you have that backward. Every 9F is 5C. Estimate it would be about 7.5C, lemme pull up the calculator – 8.3C.
The C is a chonky unit compared with F. If you’re in a real hurry, you can divide or multiply by 2 and that will get you in the ballpark. You can actually use that result and apply a correction – just divide it by 10 and then add or subtract. Instead of multiplying by 1.8 to go from C to F, multiply by 2 first and then subtract by 0.2 and then add 32 at the end.
You can also memorize all the conversions at 5C intervals too and interpolate between those in your head. Remember every 5C is 9F. And some numbers will show up more often than others and you can just cache those in your head. 35C is 95F, 27C is 80F, 30C is 86F. And the memories -18C is 0F. Brr.
I know, it’s work and let’s face it, work sucks. But when you’re stuck in Europe for a year, you have no choice, you have to convert in your head. File this away if you need it later, the rest of the world uses metric. I wonder if I should share how to convert km to mi.
If Americans are having an identity crisis, I hope it turns into multiple personality disorder. I mean that not in a strict psychological sense, but logic has only gotten us so far and going psycho for a bit might be necessary. From this alchemical stage of putrefacation new fermentatious goo may brew. On Magic Monday a commenter brought up Peace Pilgrim, one of my heroes. You mentioned in reply that she was of a particular American type, the kind who followed her own personal vision. Ala Johnny Appleseed I thought.
In the recent film Civil War ( I havent watched it… not wanting to add to its tracks in space) there was a quote talked about in articles that stayed with me: “What kind of American are you?”
I can only hope we can each find our own unique ways in order to ge able to respond as the visionary kind, the ones who find their own way, the ones who do theirvown thing.
Hi JMG,
For the 5th Wednesday, my vote is for you to write about Neptune’s entrance into Aries and what that might imply. Thanks.
I will also join the patriarchy/matriarchy bandwagon for the Fifth Wednesday. Thanks, Drew C
Once again, everyone’s votes have been tabulated.
Erika, half the reason I always put your posts through is that your style is as far from mine as possible. The other half is that there’s always something worth thinking about in there.
Justin, okay, gotcha. Remember that, autism being what it is, I don’t always recognize jokes as jokes. As for voting fraud, sure, and we can set aside Johnny Appleseed’s birthday for apple pie and vote fraud. 😉
John, I don’t know how I got my commentariat either, but you’re right that it’s the best on the internet.
Anonymous, are you suggesting that as a fifth Wednesday post?
Serinde, the thought of Scots being good-natured and openhanded makes my head hurt. Maybe it’s just my experience, or my family, but I tend to think of Scots as pinching each penny until Abe Lincoln (or, on your side of the pond, the reigning monarch) yelps in pain!
Ethan, I wonder if you’ve read these posts of mine:
https://www.ecosophia.net/on-magic-manhood-and-masculism/
https://www.ecosophia.net/on-the-metaphysics-of-sex/
https://www.ecosophia.net/our-werewolves-ourselves/
Siliconguy, and then that quiet sedimentary basin would have to be raised to surface level without any metamorphic process. There’s a reason why paleontologists estimate that only 1% of all species appear as fossils.
TylerA, so noted.
Jennifer, thanks for this. I’ve been very pleased to see conservatives in recent years become more aware of ecological issues — back before 1950 or so, conservation was a conservative issue and liberals mostly ignored it, and it’s good to see the former alignment returning.
Justin, no argument there. Central to my vision of America, certainly, is that it’s a place where people can follow their own paths, no matter how eccentric those turn out to be. My America is the America of the Shakers and the Rosicrucians, of Johnny Appleseed and Dr. Bronner and High John the Conqueror, of Cyrus Teed and Sun Ra and the Emperor Norton I. I’d like to see that America get a little more attention and respect.
No worries, my sense of humor can be subtle and droll when I am with people in person, and a quick comment doesnt always carry the massage into the medium.
…
I’ve been kicking myself all day because somehow I missed the memo that Sun Ra Arkestra played here last night at our Memorial Hall. I am on their promotional email list, but I guess I deleted the right ones and looked at the wrong ones. John Gilmore is still leading the band strong. Dang nabit!
@Ethan #77 an essay published in Time Magazine by the lesbian feminist Camille Paglia entitled – It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be
https://ideas.time.com/2013/12/16/its-a-mans-world-and-it-always-will-be/
And JMG she recognizes in the essay that our current civilization will inevitably fall as others have in history
A famous quote of hers – If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Katylina @ 56, I take it you mean to refer to Colin Renfrew and his Anatolian Hypothesis. Gimbutas was quite influential outside archeology in her day. I can still remember feminists blithely referring to ancient matriarchies as if that hypothesis were proven fact. Along with the assertion that Minoan religion, about which I think very little is known to this day, was the last flowering of mother goddess worship which had once, so it was claimed, flourished throughout Europe. How a pack of literature and sociology majors could have known all that was beyond me.
My vote is for Wilhelm Reich
oh, thanks, Papa.
that means the universe to me, especially right now in the thick of it all.
xxxxxx
JMG, this https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66 shows what I gather is geologists’ most recent theory about where landmasses were 66MYBP. They would have been slightly closer at the time of asteroid impact. In this rendering, India has begun to move off the Reunion hotspot. South America and Africa have separated far enough to account for divergent evolution of camelids. I am thinking that at the time of impact, all continents except for maybe India would have had some territory within the worst parts of the destruction zone.
Vitranc, i’m swooooning!
see that, you young men? THAT’s how you do it!
thank you. i’d shave my legs and paint my toenails for you.
x
—
“Erika, glad you liked it! That’s exactly it — the people who are melting down about Trumpety-Trump-Trump-TRUMP!!! these days are suffering a really serious crisis of identity and meaning. I’ll look forward to seeing you next June; as for the campfire et al., I wonder if maybe it’s time to do something in Providence like the event in Glastonbury, with three days or so of talks and time to hang out. If a venue for 50-100 people could be found, that would do it.”
—See, Peter Van Erp? SEE??? it’s on. we’ve gotta figure this out. anyone wanna take the lead on researching what Glastonbury even DID??? i won’t be able to jump in on this until the fall but i’m INTO it. THIS IS THE MOMENT ADOCENTYN GOES PROVIDENCE A GO! GO!
it’s been said out loud and we must make our dreams and prayers come true or we’ll think we’re liars.
PAPA gets what he’s doing, too.
we’re beautiful, you all.
whoever wants to lead and knows how to organize, i’ll produce the performances and anyone who wants to help or even take over i’m game. i’m just showing up where and whenever i’m needed. i promise i’ll have Papa’s illustration done by then. (giggle)
IT’S ON! i’m totally up for a few days of us all.
x
drhooves @ 26, “The Climate Change/Global Warming issue was marketed poorly. It is much easier to build a case around pollution and resource depletion as major problems/predicaments” Which is, forgive my cynicism, precisely the reason CC/GW was deployed to push issues of pollution and resource depletion off front pages. If you can build a case, you can sue, or petition for better laws, and, horrors, some of us nice people might lose money. I believe this is akin to what is called a limited hangout.
JMG, when I refer to ‘influencer’ I mean a talking head who has a YouTube channel, is a not infrequent guest on other social media platforms, is frequently active on X or the equivalent, and possibly maintains a substack or similar; it being an open question who exactly does the writing. Again, forgive my cynicism, I do not believe these THs are paying their own way.