Dr Ye Tao talks with Clare Farrell | 23 November 2021 | Extinction Rebellion UK

Used with permission of Extinction Rebellion. Dr. Ye Tao gives an excellent presentation weaving in social equity, and the need for nonprofit science-based solutions benefiting people in all countries such as mirrored roof tiles in India to reduce suffering during extreme heat events. 

March 6, 2022 Update: Dave Borlace's Just Have a Think posted a video Can we survive the coming decades? about the IPCC's second part of the Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policy Makers. Long ago I noted Borlace as top "Explainer" on my "Updated Best Practices for Climate Crisis." 

The end of the Extinction Rebellion above video mentions Kim Stanley Robinson's climate novel The Ministry for the Future in which a heat wave kills 20 million people in India. Interviewed by Amy Brady October 27, 2020 in Burning Worlds at Chicago Review of Books, Robinson responded, "Recent studies of the effect of heat and humidity combined have found that a temperature index of 'wet-bulb 35' (which would be about 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity, and then higher temperatures combined with slightly lower humidities [ . . . ]), are fatal to humans who can’t take shelter in air-conditioned spaces. But in heat emergencies like this, power systems are likely to be overwhelmed and go down, at which point even people unclothed, in the shade, and fanning themselves, would still die, in a kind of slow parboiling that the body just can’t handle [ . . . . ]  I remain terrified that something like this opening scene might happen in the coming decade."

In the Extinction Rebellion video Dr. Ye Tao says, "Any form of direct air capture by industrial method will not be able to work at scale, and to make a measurable impact to the climate crisis in less than several centuries of time. The basic reason is the process of demixing the air is a highly energy-intensive process. Just imagine if you had to separate a pile of well-mixed salt and pepper. So to create order out of disorder takes a lot of energy, and that is guaranteed by the laws of thermodynamics. So it doesn't really matter how much engineering you put onto it. We need an operation the size of the U. S. Military six thousand years [ . . . ] to really achieve what these companies are calling for."

This fits what Agence France-Presse wrote at The Guardian September 8, 2021, in "World’s biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland." The article notes, "Constructed by Climeworks, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, the companies say. [par break] According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported."

Three posts below I wrote, "[ . . . ] Ye Tao, RF Alumnus of Rowland Institute at Harvard, [ . . . ] I noted as a top 'Innovator' on my 'Updated Best Practices for Climate Crisis.'" This was for his video posted January 29, 2020, "Shocking Facts About Climate Change & A Possible Solution [ . . . ]"

The Last Two Men on Earth

 The Last Two Men on Earth

-- parts of this poem appeared in my February 23, 2020 post "Climate Lifeboats of the Rich and Famous?"

I recall when it was reported Bill Gates bought -- then didn't buy -- Sinot's AQUA, "the world's first hydrogen-powered yacht for $650 million" according to businessinsider.com' s Taylor Gorden

and Jeff Bezos bought -- then didn't buy super yacht Flying Fox according to stuff.co.nz's 
John Anthony. The oceans are a better climate refuge than Mars, I thought.

I wrote, "These yes -- no -- reports are like the dead parrot scene in Monty's Python's sketch about a 'resting' Norwegian Blue," and later posted about Nirvana's version of Bowie's song

"The Man Who Sold the World." as much our story as theirs. Say what you dislike about them, Earth's two richest bipedal homo sapien mammals are not fools.

Gates "aw-shucks" brilliance took him from a New Mexico garage to fame and privilege. 
His "I know something you don't"-grin is priceless in a 1977 mugshot for a traffic violation.

It was reported Bezos' Amazon empire similarly started in a garage with spunk, "a handful of employees," and marketable data. Fortunes were made, dreams came true, and many lives changed.

If you were them, what exactly would you do with your wealth, creativity, research teams, and who knows what as glaciers melt, seas rise, forests burn, crops vanish, and species die?

Playing their cards right, they may be the last two surviving humans, as neurons shut down like light switches in Halloween mansions, and words fade as in flooded seaside libraries.

#DemocracyNow "'Don't Look Up': David Sirota on His Oscar Nod for Writing Blockbuster Climate Crisis & Media Satire"

 

Regarding Don't Look Up's tech billionaire Sir Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) attempting to profit from the death comet's rare minerals, I recall Terry Macalister wrote about a real situation involving Royal Dutch Shell.  "Shell accused of strategy risking catastrophic climate change" is about "an internal document [that] acknowledged [the effect of] a global temperature rise of 4C" at The Guardian May 17, 2015. Similarly, August 25, 2018, I quoted founding director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in a video which was removed, "The CEO of Shell once told me 'The climate problem is real but it is completely intractable. You can not solve it. So, let's get rich quick before the world ends, huh?'."

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research was a partner of Noble Prize Summit -- OUR PLANET, OUR FUTURE April 26/27/28, 2021.

To complement fictional urgency of the comet in Don't Look Up, see my July 1, 2021 post "Climate Culling and Healing," about real urgency of Schellnhuber, quoted by Paddy Manning July 9, 2011 in The Sydney Morning Herald. Manning wrote "in a 4 [C] degree warmer world, the population," according to Schellnhuber, has '' … carrying capacity estimates below one billion people." Worldometers.info notes Earth's population is nearly 8 billion so it seems most would die from starvation, war, and heat.

My post noted "Imagine Earth reaches 5 C above 1850 preindustrial baseline 'within 80 years or so at our current trajectory' as noted by Dave Borlace if we don’t cut enough carbon."

I wrote, "If things get near that bad, I propose a 100-question exam designed by 3rd graders in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Haiti, Yemen, The Philippines, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and The Marshall Islands tuned by leading academics so only one eighth of the global population can pass. Everyone else dies. This would be far more equitable than 'politics of the armed lifeboat' described by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable."

Living in the Time of Dying (Free Documentary by Michael Shaw featuring Professor of Sustainability, Jem Bendell; Dharma teacher and author, Catherine Ingram; Award winning journalist and author, Dahr Jamail and Native American Elder, author and teacher Stan Rushworth)

See the link to the documentary at livinginthetimeofdying.com  I understood when posting that Jem Bendell's paper “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” is controversial among academics. For background, see Kiley Bense's December 24, 2021 Inside Climate News article "In Deep Adaptation’s Focus on Societal Collapse, a Hopeful Call to Action." The article mentions Ye Tao, RF Alumnus of Rowland Institute at Harvard, who I noted as a top "Innovator" on my "Updated Best Practices for Climate Crisis." I cited Bendell and linked to his paper in my February 7, 2019 post "Arctic Methane Debate Rages On," updated Feb. 12, 2019, April 2019, and June 2019. 

Buffering the Climate Emergency

Koda defending his otter.

Toula is our pug rescue.

Toby is our 17-year old Jack Russell who jumps like a puppy.

I followed Bill McKibben's lead, and got a puppy to go with my two older dogs. Most dogs haven't read the IPCC's dire reports. Deer, elk, squirrels, and wild birds are still magic to them, and should be to us. Koda is so smart he helps neighbor kids with their math homework.

A reader of this blog recently wrote I use too many statistics and lists. He said my readers weren't feeling the climate emergency. Yes, it's important to feel it, and it's also important to feel some joy in our days so we can keep telling people what many don't want to hear, and doing necessary work of truth-telling many don't want to do. It's odd to me this blog of a Pacific Northwest fisher/ecopoet has over 100,000 views -- odd in a good way. 

In a related matter regarding the "feeling" theme, I recently heard at Rock N' Roll True Stories, "The Cranberries former manager Allen Kovac would reveal to Rolling Stone magazine that the group's label Island Records urged The Cranberries not to release the politically-urgent song ["Zombie"] as a single. The label offered [Dolores] O'Riordan one million dollars to work on a different song but she ripped up the check, according to Kovac [ . . . . ]" Earlier in the Rock N' Roll True Stories video, it was noted "There would be one incident in particular that inspired the creation of the song. That occurred on March 20, 1993. Explosives hidden under a garbage can in the city of Warrington, Northwestern England, took the lives of a three-year-old and twelve-year-old boy, and injured dozens of others." My question for students, and others, is what is so important in your writing/singing/speaking/art you would tear up a million dollar check asking you to ignore it? (I contacted Universal Music Group to fact check the claim.)