Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[DGuller]

I think RT stood for Russia Today, but they did rebrand themselves as RT.

[grumbler]

I think RT stood for Russia Today, but they did rebrand themselves as RT.

You are correct.  Mea culpa.

[Gaijin de Moscu]

The data you are citing is almost certainly all lies and propaganda though, so you can safely ignore it. The source is printed right on the graph, the "US something something or other" and you already said all western information is bullshit.

What does Russia Times say about global warming?

I searched for Russia Times but it doesn't seem to exist. There's Moscow Times though, where Michele A. Berdy is the Cultural Editor. Why don't you ask her?

@MicheleBerdy
[email protected]

Russia Times has relabeled itself RT (for "Russia Times").  It's an amusingly good imitation of a news source.  Check it out.

I don't watch them... and I have no desire whatsoever to check them out.

[Syt]

https://www.voanews.com/a/world-must-work-together-to-tackle-plastic-ocean-threat-wwf-/6432062.html

World Must Work Together to Tackle Plastic Ocean Threat: WWF

Paris — Plastic has infiltrated all parts of the ocean and is now found "in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale" wildlife group WWF said on Tuesday, calling for urgent efforts to create an international treaty on plastics.

Tiny fragments of plastic have reached even the most remote and seemingly pristine regions of the planet: it peppers Arctic sea ice and has been found inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean, the Mariana Trench.

There is no international agreement in place to address the problem, although delegates meeting in Nairobi for a United Nations environment meeting this month are expected to launch talks on a worldwide plastics treaty.

WWF sought to bolster the case for action in its latest report, which synthesizes more than 2,000 separate scientific studies on the impacts of plastic pollution on the oceans, biodiversity and marine ecosystems.

The report acknowledged that there is currently insufficient evidence to estimate the potential repercussions on humans.

But it found that the fossil-fuel derived substance "has reached every part of the ocean, from the sea surface to the deep ocean floor, from the poles to coastlines of the most remote islands and is detectable in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale."

According to some estimates, between 19 and 23 million tons of plastic waste is washed into the world's waterways every year, the WWF report said.

This is largely from single-use plastics, which still constitute more than 60% of marine pollution, although more and more countries are acting to ban their use.

"In many places (we are) reaching some kind of saturation point for marine ecosystems, where we're approaching levels that pose a significant threat," said Eirik Lindebjerg, Global Plastics Policy Manager at WWF.

In some places there is a risk of "ecosystem collapse," he said.

Many people have seen images of seabirds choking on plastic straws or turtles wrapped in discarded fishing nets, but he said the danger is across the entire marine food web.

It "will affect not only the whale and the seal and the turtle, but huge fish stocks and the animals that depend on those," he added.

In one 2021 study, 386 fish species were found to have ingested plastic, out of 555 tested.

Separate research, looking at the major commercially fished species, found up to 30% of cod in a sample caught in the North Sea had microplastics in their stomach.

Once in the water, the plastic begins to degrade, becoming smaller and smaller until it is a "nano plastic," invisible to the naked eye.

So even if all plastic pollution stopped completely, the volume of microplastics in the oceans could still double by 2050.

But plastic production continues to rise, potentially doubling by 2040, according to projections cited by WWF, with ocean plastic pollution expected to triple during the same period.

Lindebjerg compares the situation to the climate crisis — and the concept of a "carbon budget," that caps the maximum amount of CO2 that can be released into the atmosphere before a global warming cap is exceeded.

"There is actually a limit to how much plastic pollution our marine ecosystems can absorb," he said.

Those limits have already been reached for microplastics in several parts of the world, according to WWF, particularly in the Mediterranean, the Yellow and East China Seas (between China, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula) and in the Arctic sea ice.

"We need to treat it as a fixed system that doesn't absorb plastic, and that's why we need to go towards zero emissions, zero pollution as fast as possible," said Lindebjerg.

WWF is calling for talks aimed at drawing up an international agreement on plastics at the U.N. environment meeting, from February 28 to March 2 in Nairobi.

It wants any treaty to lead to global standards of production and real "recyclability."

Trying to clean up the oceans is "extremely difficult and extremely expensive," Lindebjerg said, adding that it was better on all metrics not to pollute in the first place.

[The Brain]

In Sweden we made plastic grocery bags expensive.

Meanwhile in India more than a billion people, many living close to the coast or a river, toss their plastic garbage on the street.

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown

IPCC issues 'bleakest warning yet' on impacts of climate breakdown

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

"The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet," said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-chair of working group 2 of the IPCC. "Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future."

Droughts, floods, heatwaves
In what some scientists termed "the bleakest warning yet", the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some "irreversible" impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

'Atlas of human suffering'
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: "I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership."

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said the report "paints a dire picture of the impacts already occurring because of a warmer world and the terrible risks to our planet if we continue to ignore science. We have seen the increase in climate-fuelled extreme events, and the damage that is left behind – lives lost and livelihoods ruined. The question at this point is not whether we can altogether avoid the crisis – it is whether we can avoid the worst consequences."

The report says:

* Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
* About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas "highly vulnerable" to climate change.
* Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
* Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
* 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a "critical level" beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
* Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
* Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth's land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.

Chance to avoid the worst
This is the second part of the IPCC's latest assessment report, an updated, comprehensive review of global knowledge of the climate, which has been seven years in the making and draws on the peer-reviewed work of thousands of scientists. The assessment report is the sixth since the IPCC was first convened by the UN in 1988, and may be the last to be published while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst.

A first instalment, by the IPCC's working group 1, published last August, on the physical science of climate change, said the climate crisis was "unequivocally" caused by human actions, resulting in changes that were "unprecedented", with some becoming "irreversible".

This second part, by working group 2, deals with the impacts of climate breakdown, sets out areas where the world is most vulnerable, and details how we can try to adapt and protect against some of the impacts. A third section, due in April, will cover ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the final part, in October, will summarise these lessons for governments meeting in Egypt for the UN Cop27 climate summit.

'Cataclysmic' for small islands
Small islands will be among those worst affected. Walton Webson, an ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, called the findings "cataclysmic".

He urged the UN to convene a special session to consider action. "We are continuing to head for a precipice – we say our eyes are open to the risks, but when you look at global emissions, if anything we are accelerating towards the cliff edge. We are not seeing the action from the big emitters that is required to get emissions down in this critical decade – this means halving emissions by 2030 at the latest. It is clear that time is slipping away from us."

Governments in other parts of the world could help their people to adapt to some of the impacts of the climate crisis, the report says, by building flood defences, helping farmers to grow different crops, or building more resilient infrastructure. But the authors say the capacity of the world to adapt to the impacts will diminish rapidly the further temperatures rise, quickly reaching "hard" limits beyond which adaptation would be impossible.

'Global dominoes'
The climate crisis also has the power to worsen problems such as hunger, ill-health and poverty, the report makes clear. Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation."

The report plays down fears of conflicts arising from the climate crisis, finding that "displacement" and "involuntary migration" of people would ensue but that "non-climatic factors are the dominant drivers of existing intrastate violent conflicts".

But Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in the US, said: "The current warfare activity in eastern Europe, though not attributable to climate change, is a further caution about how human tensions and international relations and geopolitics could become inflamed as climate change impacts hit nations in ways that they are ill-prepared to handle."

[The Larch]

50º in April... 

'We are living in hell': Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves
April temperatures at unprecedented levels have led to critical water and electricity shortages

For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan's Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 50C (122F), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages of water and power.

Ahmed fears that things are only about to get worse. It was here, in 2021, that the world's highest temperature for May was recorded, a staggering 54C. This year, he said, feels even hotter. "Last week was insanely hot in Turbat. It did not feel like April," he said.

As the heatwave has exacerbated massive energy shortages across India and Pakistan, Turbat, a city of about 200,000 residents, now barely receives any electricity, with up to nine hours of load shedding every day, meaning that air conditioners and refrigerators cannot function. "We are living in hell," said Ahmed.

It has been a similar story across the subcontinent, where the realities of climate change are being felt by more than 1.5 billion people as the scorching summer temperatures have arrived two months early and the relief of the monsoons are months away. North-west and central India experienced the hottest April in 122 years, while Jacobabad, a city in Pakistan's Sindh province, hit 49C on Saturday, one of the highest April temperatures ever recorded in the world.

The heatwave has already had a devastating impact on crops, including wheat and various fruits and vegetables. In India, the yield from wheat crops has dropped by up to 50% in some of the areas worst hit by the extreme temperatures, worsening fears of global shortages following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has already had a devastating impact on supplies.

In Balochistan's Mastung district, known for its apple and peach orchards, the harvests have been decimated. Haji Ghulam Sarwar Shahwani, a farmer, watched in anguish as his apple trees blossomed more than a month early, and then despair as the blossom sizzled and then died in the unseasonal dry heat, almost killing off his entire crop. Farmers in the area also spoke of a "drastic" impact on their wheat crops, while the area has also recently been subjected to 18-hour power cuts.

"This is the first time the weather has wreaked such havoc on our crops in this area," Shahwani said. "We don't know what to do and there is no government help. The cultivation has decreased; now very few fruits grow. Farmers have lost billions because of this weather. We are suffering and we can't afford it."

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan's minister for climate, told the Guardian that the country was facing an "existential crisis" as climate emergencies were being felt from the north to south of the country.

Rehman warned that the heatwave was causing the glaciers in the north of the country to melt at an unprecedented rate, and that thousands were at risk of being caught in flood bursts. She also said that the sizzling temperatures were not only impacting crops but water supply as well. "The water reservoirs dry up. Our big dams are at dead level right now, and sources of water are scarce," she said.

Rehman said the heatwave should be a wake-up call to the international community. "Climate and weather events are here to stay and will in fact only accelerate in their scale and intensity if global leaders don't act now," she said.

Experts said the scorching heat being felt across the subcontinent was likely a taste of things to come as global heating continues to accelerate. Abhiyant Tiwari, an assistant professorand programme manager at the Gujarat Institute of Disaster Management, said "the extreme, frequent, and long-lasting spells of heatwaves are no more a future risk. It is already here and is unavoidable."

The World Meteorological Organisation said in a statement that the temperatures in India and Pakistan were "consistent with what we expect in a changing climate. Heatwaves are more frequent and more intense and starting earlier than in the past."

A heatwave is declared when the maximum temperature is over 40C and at least 4.5C above normal.

Over the weekend in India, Bikaner was the hottest place in the country at 47.1C, according to the India Meteorological Department. However, in some parts of north-west India, images captured by satellites showed that surface land temperatures had exceeded 60C – unprecedented for this time of year when usual surface temperatures are between 45 and 55C.

"The hottest temperatures recorded are south-east and south-west of Ahmedabad, with maximum land-surface temperatures of around 65C," the European Space Agency said on its website.

The high temperatures have put massive pressure on power demand in both India and Pakistan, where people have had to endure hours of power cuts amid the crippling heat. On Friday, the peak power demand in India touched an all-time high of 207,111MW, according to the government.

India is facing its worst electricity shortage in six decades. Power cuts lasting upwards of eight hours have been imposed in states including Jharkhand, Haryana, Bihar, Punjab and Maharashtra as domestic coal supplies have fallen to critical levels and the price of imported coal has soared. In a bid to speed up the transport of coal across the country, Indian Railways cancelled more than 600 passenger and postal train journeys to make way for transportation of coal to power plants.

[Tamas]

Considering how a few tens of thousands of migrants freaked the hell out of Europe in 2015, I wonder what will happen when tens of millions will decide that, actually, they don't want to live in a 50C hellhole, and would rather settle where there's milder climate and better prosperity.

[Jacob]

Considering how a few tens of thousands of migrants freaked the hell out of Europe in 2015, I wonder what will happen when tens of millions will decide that, actually, they don't want to live in a 50C hellhole, and would rather settle where there's milder climate and better prosperity.

Yeah, we're in for an eventful decade or three on the climate disaster front, that's for sure.

[CountDeMoney]

Considering how a few tens of thousands of migrants freaked the hell out of Europe in 2015, I wonder what will happen when tens of millions will decide that, actually, they don't want to live in a 50C hellhole, and would rather settle where there's milder climate and better prosperity.

Yeah, we're in for an eventful decade or three on the climate disaster front, that's for sure.

We have it on good authority here that the GOP does not consider climate change a national security issue.  So there ya go.  Problem solved.

[viper37]

Considering how a few tens of thousands of migrants freaked the hell out of Europe in 2015, I wonder what will happen when tens of millions will decide that, actually, they don't want to live in a 50C hellhole, and would rather settle where there's milder climate and better prosperity.

Last time the European climate went warmer, the Scandinavians emigrated to Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and used Baffin Islan and Labrador as vacation resort of some sort.

It's Iceland, Greenland and Canada I'm worried about.  So many new wave socialist immigrating en masse toward our pristine nordic climate...

[viper37]

Considering how a few tens of thousands of migrants freaked the hell out of Europe in 2015, I wonder what will happen when tens of millions will decide that, actually, they don't want to live in a 50C hellhole, and would rather settle where there's milder climate and better prosperity.

Yeah, we're in for an eventful decade or three on the climate disaster front, that's for sure.

We have it on good authority here that the GOP does not consider climate change a national security issue.  So there ya go.  Problem solved.

Florida won't be a problem for much longer, Texas will be so hot that they'll insist to give it back to Mexico and half of Louisiana will be below the sea, not just the sea level this time.
There ya go.  Problem solved.

[crazy canuck]

Funny/effective add from our electricity utility contrasting itself from our gas utility

https://twitter.com/bchydro/status/1521866506014904323?s=21&t=Mwzf_Lm68o3h0x09k2geIg

[Syt]

https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-amazon-deforestation-hits-new-high/a-61717387

Brazil: Amazon deforestation hits new high

The Amazon rainforest in Brazil has seen record logging for the third month this year. Environmentalists blame one person in particular for the catastrophic damage.

The area of land cleared of trees in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in April approached double that in the same month a year ago, with deforestation in the region at a record monthly level for the third time this year, preliminary government data has shown.

The large-scale removal of trees in the rainforest is seen by climate scientists as a major blow to efforts to contain global warming, as the region absorbs vast amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

In light of the records already set this year, experts warn that 2022 could mark Brazil's fourth straight year of decade-high deforestation.

What do the statistics say?

Deforestation in the region totaled 1,012.5 square kilometers (390 square miles) in the first 29 days of April, according to data from the Brazilian national space research agency Inpe.

That is 74% more than the same month in 2021, which was the previous record. Full-month figures for April will be available next week.

It is the first time that deforestation has exceeded 1,000 square kilometers during a month in the rainy season, which runs from December to April.

In January, 430 square kilometers were cleared, more than four times the amount in the same month of 2021; in February, 199 square kilometers were destroyed, up 62% from 2021.

Overall, the first four months of the year saw record deforestation, with 1,954 square kilometers cleared. That represents an increase of 69% compared with the same period in 2021.

Records on deforestation in the Amazon have been kept for the past seven years by Inpe.

Why is deforestation on the increase?

Deforestation in the Amazon has soared since right-wing populist President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.

He has weakened environmental protection for the region, arguing that more farming and mining in the Amazon will help reduce poverty in the region.

"The cause of this record has a first and last name: Jair Messias Bolsonaro," said Marcio Astrini, head of Brazilian advocacy group Climate Observatory, in a statement.

The Brazilian Environment and Justice ministries, in their turn, said in a statement that the government was doing much to fight environmental crimes and combat deforestation in five Amazon states.

Among other things, the major road-building projects in the Amazon promoted by Bolsonaro are driving illegal logging by facilitating access, which drives up land value and makes economic activities, such as cattle-raising, easier.

The Amazon is the world's largest tropical rainforest and an enormous carbon sink. Climate scientists fear that deforestation of the Amazon rainforest will not only release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also lead to the eventual degradation of the forest into tropical savannah.

Austrian Der Standard had additional numbers. August 2020 - July 2021 saw the burning of 13,000 km² of the Amazon. Estimates are that 17-20% of the Amazon have been destroyed so far, and that at 20-25% a point may be reached where it won't be able to recover. At current rates, 1% disappears every 3-5 years. The burning of the forests releases 1-2 gigatons of CO2 annually (global annual CO2 output is 50 gigatons according to Standard).

[Syt]

https://www.undrr.org/news/humanitys-broken-risk-perception-reversing-global-progress-spiral-self-destruction-finds-new

Humanity's broken risk perception is reversing global progress in a 'spiral of self-destruction', finds new UN report

World could undo social and economic advances and face 1.5 disasters a day by 2030, according to UN's flagship Global Assessment Report.

April 26, 2022, NEW YORK/GENEVA – Human activity and behaviour is contributing to an increasing number of disasters across the world, putting millions of lives and every social and economic gain in danger, warns a new UN report.

The Global Assessment Report (GAR2022), released by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) ahead of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in May, reveals that between 350 and 500 medium- to large-scale disasters took place every year over the past two decades. The number of disaster events is projected to reach 560 a year – or 1.5 disasters a day – by 2030.

The GAR2022 blames these disasters on a broken perception of risk based on "optimism, underestimation and invincibility," which leads to policy, finance and development decisions that exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and put people in danger.

"The world needs to do more to incorporate disaster risk in how we live, build and invest, which is setting humanity on a spiral of self-destruction," said Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, who presented the report at the UN headquarters in New York.

"We must turn our collective complacency to action. Together we can slow the rate of preventable disasters as we work to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals for everyone, everywhere."

The report entitled "Our World at Risk: Transforming Governance for a Resilient Future," found that the implementation of disaster risk reduction strategies, as called for in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, had reduced both the number of people impacted and killed by disasters in the last decade.

However, the scale and intensity of disasters are increasing, with more people killed or affected by disasters in the last five years than in the previous five.

Disasters disproportionately impact developing countries, which lose an average of one percent of GDP a year to disasters, compared to 0.1-0.3 per cent in developed countries. The highest cost is borne by the Asia-Pacific region, which loses an average 1.6 percent of GDP to disasters every year, while the poorest also suffer the most within developing countries.

Adding to the long term impacts of disasters is the lack of insurance to aid in recovery efforts to build back better. Since 1980, just 40 percent of disaster-related losses were insured while insurance coverage rates in developing countries were often below 10 percent, and sometimes close to zero, the report said.

"Disasters can be prevented, but only if countries invest the time and resources to understand and reduce their risks," said Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head of UNDRR.

"By deliberately ignoring risk and failing to integrate it in decision making, the world is effectively bankrolling its own destruction. Critical sectors, from government to development and financial services, must urgently rethink how they perceive and address disaster risk."

A growing area of risk is around more extreme weather events as a result of climate change.  GAR2022 builds on the calls to accelerate adaptation efforts made at COP26 by showcasing how policymakers can climate-proof development and investments. This includes reforming national budget planning to consider risk and uncertainty, while also reconfiguring legal and financial systems to incentivize risk reduction. It also offers examples that countries can learn from, such as Costa Rica's innovative carbon tax on fuel launched in 1997, which helped to reverse deforestation, a major driver of disaster risks, while benefiting the economy.  In 2018, 98 percent of the electricity in Costa Rica came from renewable energy sources.

GAR2022 was drafted by a group of experts from around the world as a reflection of the various areas of expertise required to understand and reduce complex risks. The findings of the report will feed into the Midterm Review of the implementation of the Sendai Framework, which includes national consultations and reviews of how countries are performing against the goal, targets and priorities for action of the Sendai Framework.

"As the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework is underway, this report should be a wake-up call that countries need to accelerate action across the Framework's four priorities to stop the spiral of increasing disasters," said Mizutori

"The good news is that human decisions are the largest contributors to disaster risk, so we have the power to substantially reduce the threats posed to humanity, and especially the most vulnerable among us."

https://www.salon.com/2022/05/08/prognostic-myopia/

How a quirk of the brain prevents us from caring about climate change

A very human way of thinking is limiting our ability to stop the climate apocalypse. Some of us can overcome it

By JUSTIN GREGG
PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2022 2:00PM (EDT)

On April 6th, Dr. Peter Kalmus, NASA climate scientist and author, walked up to the JP Morgan Chase bank building in Los Angeles, pulled a pair of handcuffs out of a cloth bag and chained himself to the front door. With tears in his eyes, he spoke about the climate crisis to a group of supporters. 

"We've been trying to warn you guys for so many decades that we're heading towards a f**king catastrophe," he says in a video from the protest which has since gone viral on Twitter. "And we end up being ignored. The scientists of the world are being ignored. And it's got to stop. We're going to lose everything."

Like me, Kalmus is a scientist – passionate about uncovering the nature of reality. A reality being threated by rapidly rising global temperatures. Unlike me, Kalmus is actually doing something about it. He is a member of Scientist Rebellion – a group of academics and scientists fighting to draw attention to "the reality and severity of the  climate  and  ecological  emergency  by  engaging  in  non-violent  civil  disobedience."

Watching Kalmus give his impassioned speech on the steps of the bank, I am both humbled and envious. I wonder why it is that I don't seem to care about the climate crisis as much as he does. The best explanation from my perspective as a cognitive scientist involves a fundamental flaw in my human psychology: the inability to care all that much about what happens in the distant future. But I wondered how Peter Kalmus might explain the public's apparent lack of enthusiasm when it comes to fighting the good fight. So I wrote him to ask.

"I think climate denial in the media plays a huge role here," he wrote back to me. "Bits and pieces of the emergency are reported (and they are scary) but they are not related to the future and how they will impact civilization, i.e., potential collapse of civilization is never mentioned."

There are solid numbers to back up this claim. "Less than a quarter of the public hear about climate change in the media at least once a month," wrote Mark Hertsgaard, editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and one of the co-founders of Covering Climate Now, a media collaboration fighting to get more news coverage of the climate crisis.  And when these stories are reported, they rarely talk about the existential threat posed by the climate crisis, but instead present hopeful (and often delusional) solutions.

"The effectively irreversible nature of most climate impacts is never mentioned either," wrote Kalmus. "Instead, usually tech 'solutions' are highlighted, or a sense that we still have 'budget' for some heating milestone (e.g., 2°C) which is implied to be 'safe.' So there is no urgency in the news media."

The thing is, I do understand the urgency. I have read the findings presented in the third volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report published on April 4th. It was a document full of unequivocally dire warnings, and the catalyst for Kalmus' protest. It warns that we are on course for a rise in global temperature well beyond the 1.5 °C goal set by the Paris Agreement (and possibly headed up toward 3°C) by the end of the century with no functional plan in place to stop it from happening. Just to be clear, that could render most of the planet uninhabitable for our species. I know this. And yet, I do almost nothing about it. I spend most of my days reading books, watching Netflix, and planning supper. Like almost everyone on this planet, I am not acting like there is a climate emergency.

It's possible that I, like many others, am behaving in a way common to someone processing the threat of impending cultural trauma. This is a term to refer to a horrendous event that irrevocably changes a society's identity or destroys the social order. A common response to an impending threat of this magnitude is to fight to maintain the status quo. In doing so, a kind of social inertia crops up where people do everything they can to keep living their lives the way they always have, despite the looming implosion of society. Perhaps I, like so many others, am fully aware of the horrific outcomes of climate change, but my mind generates a kind of trauma-avoiding denial that shields me from reality. It helps me tune out the IPCC report and tune in to "Bridgerton" instead.

There is, however, and even older psychological response than denial that could explain why I, like so many others, am not chaining myself to banks in the face of the impending extinction of humanity.

Edward Wasserman is a psychologist studying animal behavior and author of the book "As If By Design" who offered an elegantly simple explanation as to why humans are so bad at dealing with climate change. It boils down to the way all animals — including humans — have been designed by evolution to deal with common everyday problems like finding food, safety, or sex.

"Being the first to spot a ripe berry or a deadly predator might give an organism only a short-lived interval of time in which to engage in adaptive action," Wasserman wrote in his blog for Psychology Today.  "This reality prompts organisms to act impulsively. However, such impulsivity is obviously at odds with appreciating and contending with the slowly rising warning signs for climate change."

The problem is that humans, like all animals, evolved to solve problems in the here and now. This means that our emotions — the primary driver of behavior — are designed to force us to act based on the potential for an immediate reward.

Humans are unique in that, sometime in the past 250 thousand years, we evolved the ability to think about the distant future. We can contemplate what our lives might be like months or even years down the road — something that no other animal species can do (as far as we know). But this recently evolved cognitive skill functions separately from the ancient emotional system that generates everyday animal behavior.

If you, for example, decide to invest in a retirement savings scheme, it's because you appealed to a complex intellectual calculation concerning what your life might be like decades in the future. There is nothing immediately satisfying about saving money right now. Retirement schemes are not impulsive acts that generate dopamine rushes, like drinking a daquiri, solving Wordle, or eating a chocolate chip cookie. Far-future planning is a purely intellectual exercise.

I use the term prognostic myopia to denote this disconnect between the human ability to think about the distant future and our inability to actually feel strongly about that future. Prognostic means one's ability to predict the future; myopia means nearsightedness. It's prognostic myopia that explains the inertia that individuals, societies, and governments have when it comes to solving climate change. The IPCC report was clear that fossil fuel extraction needed to cease as soon as possible, lest we set ourselves on a course for extinction. And yet, on April 11th, less than a week after the IPCC report, the Canadian government approved the Bay du Nord offshore oil project, which will extract 300 million barrels of oil off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. On April 15th, the Biden administration announced that The Bureau of Land Management will resume and thus increase oil and gas leasing on public lands (breaking a campaign promise). In both cases, this is exactly the thing the IPCC report said we have to stop doing immediately if we want to prevent human extinction. This is prognostic myopia in action. It feels more important to address the threat of rising oil prices or the stability of the economy in the here and now even if it hastens our extinction in a few decades. It's both unforgivable and completely understandable within the context of human psychology.

Kalmus, however, is different. He is reacting to future threats as if they are a present danger, seemingly sidestepping the problem of prognostic myopia. His emotional reaction is raw, unyielding, and driving him to act. This is both exceptional as far as the human conditions goes, and admirable. If we heed his warnings and act with the urgency outlined in the IPCC report, there is hope that our species will avoid extinction.

To admit that humans are governed by impulsivity and cowed into nonchalance in the face of cultural trauma by prognostic myopia is not an excuse for inaction. We might not all feel the same way about the future as Peter Kalmus, but we can concede that we should be listening to him. "People should be joining together, putting in significant effort, and taking risks to wake up society," he wrote me. "Civil disobedience is the most effective thing I've found so far for pushing back against the cultural wall of inaction and despair."

It's more than likely that I, like most people, will never feel the emotional connection to the problem of climate change that Kalmus does. But knowing that there is a psychological explanation for our lack of emotional investment, we can instead appeal to our intellect to guide our actions. We can decide to listen to those scientists literally yelling at us to do something. Perhaps it's time that we let those who can feel the future guide us into it.