Following the science to the grave

Someone else's science. Your death

There are some astounding heat events happening outside the headline ones.

The ones you're seeing - the heat in the US south-west, Europe, and the fires in Greece and Canada - aren't leaving much room for the others.

They include midsummer heat in the middle of South America's winter, with temperatures up to 35C in Argentina and night-time lows in the capital Buenos Aires not falling under 23C. In Paraguay and Bolivia it was even hotter. It’s winter. It should be cold.

Heat in the Caribbean and Central America has also been unprecedented. Perhaps even more astoundingly, in the middle of Antarctic winter, when the sun isn't rising, at times it has been well above freezing, almost into the double figures.

Some people will say this is no big deal. Some would probably even agree it is climate change, but that a few days of anomalous heat in winter is no reason for panic.

But these events are not just moments in time. They are snapshots into the future. 35C in the middle of winter for a few days in 2023 will become 35C for a few weeks by 2040.

Record-breaking 42C in Rome for a day becomes 42C in Rome for a week. 45C in Greece for a few days becomes 50C for a few days in the near future. As the ball rolls down the hill, the heat extremes get more extreme and their length extends.

And what will extreme heat do to countries reliant on not-extreme heat?  

Tourism accounts for 20% of Greece's GDP. In Spain, which saw 47C in the south and 45C in the normally temperate north, it's 12% and 2.6 million direct jobs (i.e. on the books). In Italy, which has been hit with numerous near 48C days on its islands as well as stifling city heat, tourism accounts for nearly 15% of all jobs in the country. 

What happens to these places when it's too hot in the summer to have a proper tourist season? When the risk of fire is such that insurers won't insure the hotels, the bars, or you the traveller? What happens to the jobs, the industries?

We can castigate these countries and their leaders for relying on an inherently unstable economic model in a warming world. But that's not much help right now. The tracks were laid in a world with a more stable, less extreme climate. And the train is now running on those tracks. 

Then there's crops. We don't have to wonder what all this heat is going to do to crops. Scientists have told us, and it's bad. Really bad. Global crop failure bad.

We are living at the end of a world. 

The world will go on, but this world, the world many of us knew and largely took for granted, is over. It no longer exists. Some have just realised this sooner than others.

A rapidly warming world will leave no place, no sector, no job, no crop, untouched. And these places will be disrupted while a pandemic virus rages in the background, running through populations, leaving many with life-long illnesses and disrupting societies long into the future. 

These places will be disrupted by viral and climatic stressors as cancer rates continue to explode, heaping further pressure on buckling societies.

We are approaching a full spectrum cataclysm. 

Optimists say that while the trends are not good, the choices 'we' make determine the future. This is toxic optimism detached from political and power realities. The question is not what choices we make, it is what choices we are permitted to make.

Political systems are largely bought and run by big money business-as-usual lobbies. The choices we are given under these conditions are superficially democratic, often different only in their presentation. Biden greenlights drilling in the Arctic. Builds the contested pipelines. Oversees three times the amount of covid death as Trump. And he's the good guy, apparently. 

And despite the obvious political and societal under-reaction to our times, there are the credentialed grifters who argue that the tiniest efforts to do something about climate chaos or the pandemic are in fact over-reactions. You know the type. The climate sceptics and infectious disease people who scream alarmism. Who argue politicians are doing too much about these threats. That the real danger is that we over-react to threats we are obviously under-reacting to. And the media who amplify these people.

They do this because they are bad faith actors. 

And this is why 'follow the science' is a hollow slogan.

Science is always contested. 

There will always be struggle. 

Many scientists are capitalists before they are scientists. 

And they will happily lead you to your grave under the guise of science. This is the essence of herd immunity. Or the essence of a 2C warming 'target.' They both mean lots of dead people. The gloss provided by the scientific method can disguise a brutalist agenda.

And these grifters are often well-paid to ensure the contest drags on and on, long enough for more profit to be consolidated. Long enough for them to cash out.

This doesn't mean we are powerless. It means we have to think about how to exercise our power in a different way. 

It means protest. 

It means civil disobedience. 

It means organising outside of mainstream political structures. 

It means pushing on those structures when necessary, but never in expectation or hope.

It means community. 

It means self-reliance.

It means giving up on a world and building a new one.