Paul Maidowski Profile picture
Mar 7 5 tweets 2 min read
Ukraine-Russia context: LTG 1972 and Copenhagen 2009, our final warnings, went unheeded. What options remain: (1) enforce degrowth & resilience; or (2) continued growth, collapse or extinction. Survivors form a degrowth or post-collapse world order. Do we have your attention? 1/?
2/ I don't know what needs to be repeated as this has all long been clear to anyone paying attention. As current policy is based on myths & wishful thinking, facing reality changes our mental models. People can only do this themselves, we can't force them.
4/ The problem is that the proximate causes of unsustainability (growth and ecological overshoot) and their symptoms (climate change, resource depletion, pollution and inequality) are systematically kept out of public policy. Hence they are not understood.
5/ The problem is existential. Reflect what this means. The scientists who warn that we only have, at best, a few years for option 1 (resilience) are regularly dismissed. Fine - now think about what happens in the coming years if they turn out to be right.

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More from @_ppmv

Mar 7
Critical thought by scientists & investigators needed. Peter Wadhams is sharp but correct. Fatal systemic IPCC bias ("erring on the side of least drama") is well documented but rarely challenged. Especially methane. Image
(Recall, "one death = a crime, a million deaths = a statistic.")

One example - interesting paper out soon, if I read this correctly. @lasch2002
@lasch2002 3/ For anyone who is new to these questions: they are so stressful because - in climate terms - there is a good chance that if we don't sort these out, almost nothing else we do really matters. And they are hard to sort.

Good methane intro @PaulHBeckwith:
Read 10 tweets
Mar 7
Reminder: Just because no one is telling you that some governments plan decades ahead, and that today's decisions are climate-driven, doesn't mean it's not happening.
2/ Most seem to imagine a liberal future world order like ours—with state sovereignty, freedoms, human rights, international law etc., but somehow without fossil fuel use,—only in a 4-8°C warmer world? 🥳🤣? How on Earth does anyone still believe this?
3/ Leaders know billions will die. Some have known since the 1980s.

Think about what this means. Don't assume you or your children will be spared.

Read some history. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World versobooks.com/books/2311-lat…
Read 20 tweets
Mar 6
If we ignore the views from outside the silo, we may create hope for us now - but will inevitably crash harder later. I appeal to common sense. Time to move beyond abstraction, to unlearn complex systems' 'necessary lies' (Kaminsky). Much depends on us getting it right this time. Image
PNS scholars and teachers like @SFuntowicz have been discussing it for three decades, challenging even the first Nordhaus papers, but climate science at large has not responded. This really matters. Time, my friends, is running out. sci-hub.ru/10.1080/030851…
Read 6 tweets
Mar 1
IPCC author literally begging you to read the AR6. The summary for policymakers (SPM) doesn’t work for me, but the rest - 3000+ pages - looks tremendous. It is unlike any other report you’ve seen. If we fuck this up, there is no long-term future. So, dig in. Climate thread 1/?
2/ To start, good advice by @mich_koenig: the 2-page IPCC summary factsheets may help. The goal IMHO should be to bring this report into actionable form, for government or corporate decisionmaking. Change requires different *form* than academic papers. Image
3/ Disclaimer: welcome to the IPCC's contradictory model world. Economists (IAMs) expect a growing global economy even in future 4°C hell. Yet it is the basis of all current climate policy, so let's hop in. @climateinteract models help as dynamic intro. 🙏 ImageImageImage
Read 20 tweets
Feb 28
~"We are starting to lose habitat for the human species," co-chair Hans-Otto Pörtner just *said* in the presser. I was gonna do a summary thread of the IPCC AR6 WG2 SPM, but the words "habitat loss" and "aerosols" don't even *appear in writing* so I don't know if it's worth it.
1/ Burning embers diagrams are turning into burning towers diagrams. Idk what such diagrams are to tell us; systems thinking clearly missing. Report introduces 127 (!?) "key risks" but doesn't prioritize. We have no baseline to adapt to. Good luck I guess.
2/ There is so much we can do. Maybe look for local ecologists, systems designers, and communicators. We can do so much better than this. Start with the oceans. If we don't get this shit under control, Ukraine is but a minor warm-up. SROCC @xr_cambridge:
Read 7 tweets
Feb 27
Good paper. But Putin brings us to the brink of nuclear war and threatens Ukraine with flamethrowers that melt people from inside. IPCC AR6, tomorrow, will receive paltry coverage. And scientists are out there having the same old petty arguments, long since divorced from reality?
Mainstream scientists are in denial of existential climate risk. They retreated into a fantasy world of mathematical models in which they feel safe. A pathetic failure to warn society in the last few years in which we could still act.

Meanwhile society:

Climate activists are literally risking their lives, and tenured professors can’t even bring themselves to tell policymakers the truth. W t f

Be safe @MakichyanA 🙏💚 🇷🇺
Read 4 tweets

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