Thread by @caitoz

It's Really Weird How Little We Talk About Humanity's Imminent Doom

"It's like if you knew you had a deadly but treatable disease, and not only did you not pursue treatment, you also didn't think about it much and didn't talk about it with anyone."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-really-w…

It's Really Weird How Little We Talk About Humanity's Imminent Doom

"People bicker and argue about global warming and what should be done about it and if it even exists, but climate change is only one of the many ways our biosphere is moving toward death"
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/it…

Did you know the insects are vanishing?

They are. Land-dwelling insects like butterflies, ants and grasshoppers are now half as common as they were 75 years ago.

https://twitter.com/ECOWARRIORSS/status/1253656725242200064?s=20

That's why those of you who remember catching fireflies on summer nights as kids don't see them much anymore, and why car windshields don't get covered in dead bugs like they used to.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

This is a part of the animal kingdom that the rest of the ecosystem is built upon, and it's undergone a drastic plummet that we've personally witnessed in our own lifetimes.
theguardian.com/environment/20…

People bicker about global warming and what should be done about it and if it even exists, but climate change is only one of the many ways our biosphere is moving toward death. There's also been a loss of 2/3 of Earth's wildlife in the last 50 years,
npr.org/2020/09/10/911…

Ecosystems dying off,

https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1338160972712775684?s=20

Forests disappearing,

https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1105018529240281088?s=20

Soil becoming rapidly less fertile,
theguardian.com/environment/20…

Oceans gasping for oxygen and becoming lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, and the aforementioned insect apocalypse.
scientificamerican.com/article/the-oc…

The way the debate fixates solely on temperature is like if someone had cancer throughout their body and they were in a coma and their vital signs were dropping and death was imminent, and everyone was stuck on arguing over whether low blood pressure is necessarily a bad thing.

And nothing's being done about global warming anyway. Conspiracy types have been claiming for decades that it's a hoax designed to advance this or that agenda, and during that time the only thing that's advanced is ecocidal capitalism and the temperature of the planet.

The COP26 has seen world leaders issue a non-binding pledge to achieve carbon neutrality “by or around mid-century” while taking naps and tossing coins into Rome's Trevi Fountain for "luck" in addressing the issue they could all solve if they wanted to.

https://twitter.com/zachjourno/status/1455174496164458496

"Carbon neutrality" is itself a highly misleading and potentially completely worthless neoliberal sham designed to allow the continuation of carbon output but attempting to fix it with more consumption.
climatechangenews.com/2020/12/11/10-…

Meanwhile methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon in the short term—has started hemorrhaging into the atmosphere from thawing arctic permafrost, and no one really knows what to do about it.
smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tic…

This, like the albedo effect of polar ice loss and numerous other self-reinforcing warming effects that have been unlocking in recent years, can potentially cause the Earth to continue warming all on its own regardless of future human behavior.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice%E2%80…

That's all on top of the western empire ramping up world-threatening aggressions against both nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed China simultaneously, a multi-front cold war the likes of which we've never seen before and which is only getting started.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/detente-the-…

And if we don't wipe ourselves out by climate collapse or nuclear war, we could still easily do it fairly soon with weaponized AI.
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

So our species is facing existential threats on myriad fronts which could easily lead to horrifying extinction-level events that we could easily see unfold in our own lifetimes.

And it's just so very strange how we don't talk about that more.

It's like if you knew you had a deadly but treatable disease, and not only did you not pursue treatment, you also didn't think about it much and didn't talk about it with anyone. None of your friends even brought it up.

The way we're just sitting around going about our lives like this isn't happening reminds me of that experiment where participants sit in a waiting room that's filling up with smoke without knowing that the experiment is already underway.

If the participants are alone they'll generally take action to do something about the problem, but if they're in the waiting room with other people who are secretly in on the experiment and have been told to ignore the smoke, the participant will also ignore it.

It's what @boburnham calls "that funny feeling", that peculiar experience of watching the smoke pouring into the room while no one does anything, of knowing we're hurtling toward our destruction while news media pundits babble about nonsense.

But it doesn't have to stay that way. We can help humanity fight its way out of our waiting room stupor by taking action to spread awareness of the problems we face and their underlying causes, since that's what makes any real difference in such matters.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/consciousnes…

Whether we're on our way to our doom or not, and whether struggle is futile or not, working to help as a gratuitous act of love is still the sanest possible response to this glorious mess.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-boy-and-…

And even if we are all doomed and our fate is already sealed, it doesn't have to be all bad. Some people with terminal diagnoses will tell you they've been living more in their last few months of life than in all their preceding decades combined.

If you don't succumb to doomerism and defeatism and really embrace this moment in history for what it is, this is the best possible time for a human to be alive.
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/it…