The Rise of Methane and What to Look forward to

The title above is slightly misleading. As a long term observer of climate science and investigator of kinds of what industry knows about the trajectory we are on, the rise of atmosepheric methane is no surprise. Its explained by some to originate from decomposing biomass in the permafrost, but it has been locked up in ice in the soil and at the bottom of our oceans for millenia, and is mostly just being released. Its “bacterial farts” and the gas can make a complex with frozen water called clathrate. When the ice melts the methane is released.

Worst case predictions are a rise in temperature of up to 12 degrees, this has happened in the Earths history. That’s simply unsurvivable for humanity, it may even become “Hothouse Earth”, which seems to be a state of our atmosphere that heats up somewhat like Venus. We are lucky with mostly nitrogen, Earth is not Venus, but constant evaporation of water will not cool Earth down, but instead will lock more heat into the atmosphere.

The endgame we would face if we where all cats or dogs would be that the oceans become to hot for fish to survive (too little oxygen), and start to rot and emit H2S, which would then kill most life on land, life that is already parched. So the hot planet with storms and heatwaves and floods and droughts would have a biting atmosphere that would not allow big oxygen breathing animals like humans to survive. If we where cats and dogs.

This is all terribly bad. The discourse is on a completely other level. Oil companies can still simply go about their business. The neat suit never loses ist power to lull people into positive expectations. Neat people can be complete cunts, and oil companies simply don’t care about humanity, they have known for decades of the dangers of what they are doing. Our minds are local, we can easily slip into the illusion everything is ok if we don’t see what goes wrong elsewhere.

Why wouldn’t we lose hope in the face of this new climate threat. Reason nr one is that that would be less fun. Let’s not be pussies, lets live a little.

Reason nr two is that we have technology, we are not sheep led to slaughter, even though industry wants us to behave like that : Drone like consumers without a sense of past or future. But we lack ways to organize, we are now invited to organize as a party, but there’s no time for that. That’s why there are demonstrations, people want to organize in a usefull group now, change laws immediately. Social media can not be used to achieve this, because they suppress such developments and allow individually targeted psychological manipulation.

Its better to start cooperatives and societies to at least find those that want to help you and who you can help to change things. Just withdrawing from fossil fuel dependence is an enormously important step. The biggest obstacle here are banks, who have everyone in this illusory debt. Debt in a fossil credit economy has only one embodyment : CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s where the fossil fuel went as we burned it. We can not replace that fuel, we can not pay our debt. Banks create new debt to pay the old debt, the control they lord over us is a complete fiction, and you find that out when you go bankrupt or have no debt or fossil fuel need.

Create local groups that are outside the fossil economy, what we call Extraeconomic enclaves. They should produce resources but not sell them in the fossil economy, so for instance plant trees but not burn or cut them down. Buy land, grow your own food, aquire renewable energy sources so you can sell the energy in return for whatever you need. The shift to solar/wind/electric is essential to be invulnerable to a fossil industry that suddenly falters.

Reason nr three is that we have mastered the art of mass manufacturing. Only a couple of hundred years ago we could not replicate anything to any degree of precision. Now we curn out millions of exactly identical items. That means that once we develop a lightweight bipedal manually dexterious robot we will be able to mass produce them, and even use them to mass produce themselves. This is not technooptimism because we are not talking Thorium reactors that have never worked. Tesla just revealed a powerfull roadbot the Cybertruck. That thing will be able to drive through firestorms and haul all kinds of usefull machinery to help fight either the cause or the effects of climate change.

We need to create those systems. We need to create systems to plant trees that we can mass produce, we need to deploy wind turbines in the Arctic that spray water into the air so more ice forms. We should look for ways to make more plants grow on the ocean so that the solar heat doesn’t penetrate too deeply. We should be looking for ways to turn sand into a more reflective material (cover with salt) or ways to capture fresh flood water and mass produce fresh water storage devices. Or ways to oxygenate ocean water (we have a great concept) and bring nutrients to the surface.

Reason nr four is that there are better ways to organize our lives. We need to free ourselves from the basic economic process that is soo stuff oriented. We are easy to manipulate if we are tired and trying to distract ourselves consuming TV or other media, but we should not be so weak as to always have to pay for everything. The wet dream of the economy is that we are soo afraid to do anything we behave exactly as shown to us in the media, and consume exactly what we are told to consume, and when we become unattractive or lack the money to consume anymore, fuck off to hand our insurance money to the health care industry. Why? Because we can’t be fighting corruption and commecial influences as we fight climate change. Vote to make all the services everyone needs public.

If the deserts are what we are left with then this still doesn’t mean we can’t survive. The species that did survive the climate extinctions showed in the image above lived underground. Plenty of ways to make that work. As long as we build technology to revert the atmosphere to one that keeps our planet cool (and this will take thousands of years) we have a chance. There are plenty of constructions left over from up to 5000 years ago. We can build structures that convert CO2 into Carbon or even hydrocarbons. What will make the absolute difference is that we don’t waste time organizing to actually do such things. We may also have to move into regions that are cheap and where we can act in freedom.

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