Extreme Heat Is Here to Stay. Why Are We Not More Afraid?

In “The Heat Will Kill You First,” Jeff Goodell documents the lethal effects of rising temperatures and argues that we need to take hot weather a lot more seriously.

...As this terrifying book makes exceptionally clear, thinking we can just crank up the A.C. is a dangerous way to live. Goodell, who has written about climate change for more than a decade, is currently based in Texas, where “every heat wave is a nail-biter” — including, coincidentally, the one that is happening right now. In addition to the viciousness of the climate-control cycle — we cool ourselves on a warming planet by making the planet warmer — powering all those air-conditioners is like playing chicken with the electrical grid: “If power goes out for long on a hot day, businesses shut down, schools close and people die.”

Goodell’s stripped-down style suits his subject. This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time. Death is a common refrain, and it doesn’t apply only to humans. “When it gets too hot, things die,” an agricultural ecologist tells Goodell. Or, as Goodell writes of creatures that adapt by moving to cooler places: “If they can’t find refuge, they die.” A hotter world puts the most vulnerable at risk — the old, the sick, the poor...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/books/review/the-heat-will-kill-you-first-jeff-goodell.html?smid=em-share

Digging up bones

My Last Shopping List for Him

"…When we bury our loved ones in Greece, tradition requires that we exhume the bones after three years for lack of space; it's rare to get a two- or three-year extension…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/style/modern-love-greece-loss-last-shopping-list.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Last Shopping List for Him

Natural (compost) burial looks better all the time…

Henry on hubris

"Anthropocene, a popular twenty-first-century term, refers to the period in which human beings began to shape the world in fundamental ways through technology; machines, culture, and nature could no longer be disaggregated in the Anthropocene. Thoreau could never endorse Etzler’s deeply hubristic plan for the future. At best, Etzler’s promise for the machine age was a mirage. But even if such techno-social arrangements were realizable, according to Thoreau, a question would remain: Would they be, when fully and properly accounted, better or worse for us?"

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" by John Kaag, Jonathan van Belle: https://a.co/iCoxnDL

Recent, Rapid Ocean Warming Ahead of El Niño Alarms Scientists - BBC News

"The average surface temperature of the world's seas has increased by around 0.9C compared to preindustrial levels, with 0.6C coming in the last 40 years alone.

This is less than increases in air temperatures over the land - which have risen by more than 1.5C since preindustrial times. This is because much more energy is needed to heat water than land, and because oceans absorb heat far below their surface.

Even this seemingly small average increase has significant real-world consequences.

• Loss of species: more frequent and intense marine heatwaves lead to mass mortality of sea life. This is particularly damaging for coral reefs.
• More extreme weather: increased heat in the upper ocean surface means hurricanes and cyclones can pick up more energy. This means they become more intense and longer-lasting.
• Sea-level rise: warmer waters take up more space - known as thermal expansion - and can greatly accelerate the melting of glaciers from Greenland and Antarctica that flow into the oceans. This raises global sea levels, increasing risks of coastal flooding.
• Less ability to absorb CO2: the oceans currently take up about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Warmer waters have less ability to absorb CO2. If the oceans take up less CO2 in future, more would accumulate in the atmosphere - further warming the air and oceans."

Full article here:  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934 

Our Most Important Environmentalists Are 4 Years Old

They can teach children how important it is for everyone to help.

...Maybe it seems a little excessive for someone to bring home an armload of environmental books meant for her neighbors’ children to read, but to me it felt like an exercise in hope.

As I read those books, it dawned on me that picture-book authors and illustrators are laying the groundwork for a better climate future by tapping into children’s inborn compassion, curiosity and sense of justice. These books explain how important it is for everyone to help, kids included, and they give the adults no place to hide. If a child can care so much, shouldn’t we care, too?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/opinion/books-children-climate-change.html?smid=em-share

Carl Sagan, 1990, on being "prudent"

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In Defense of Humanity

We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence.

...As a small child in Concord, Massachusetts, I could see Emerson's home from my bedroom window. Recently, I went back for a visit. Emerson's house has always captured my imagination. He lived there for 47 years until his death, in 1882. Today, it is maintained by his descendants and a small staff dedicated to his legacy. The house is some 200 years old, and shows its age in creaks and stains. But it also possesses a quality that is extraordinarily rare for a structure of such historic importance: 141 years after his death, Emerson's house still feels like his. His books are on the shelves. One of his hats hangs on a hook by the door. The original William Morris wallpaper is bright green in the carriage entryway. A rendering of Francesco Salviati's The Three Fates, holding the thread of destiny, stands watch over the mantel in his study. This is the room in which Emerson wrote Nature. The table where he sat to write it is still there, next to the fireplace.

Standing in Emerson's study, I thought about how no technology is as good as going to the place, whatever the destination. No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon. It is why you touch the arm of the person beside you as you laugh. And it is why you stand in awe at the Jardin des Plantes, floored by the universe as it reveals its hidden code to you. Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic

Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into Our Warming World?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on personal responsibility and climate change.

...my fiancé and I, who are both Generation Z, care deeply about the planet and painfully watch as scientists predict that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2030s. Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?

We realize that a child’s very existence adds to our carbon footprint, but as parents we would do our best to foster an environmentally friendly household and try to teach our children how to navigate life sustainably. My fiancé says that because we are privileged as two working engineers in the United States, we can provide enough financial support to keep our children from feeling the brunt of the damage from climate change. Is it OK to use this privilege? — April

From the Ethicist:

Here are two questions that we often ask about an action. First, what difference would it make? Second, what would happen if everyone did it? Both raise important considerations, but they can point in opposite directions. The first question asks us to assess the specific consequences of an act. The second question asks us (as Kant would say) to “universalize the maxim” — to determine whether the rule guiding your action is one that everyone should follow. (I won’t get into the philosophers’ debates about how these maxims are to be specified.) Suppose someone pockets a ChapStick from Walgreens and asks: What difference does it make? One answer is that if everyone were to shoplift at their pleasure, the retail system would break down.

There’s no such clash in answering those questions when it comes to your having at least one child. The marginal effect of adding a few humans to a planet of about eight billion people is negligible. (A recent paper, by a group of environmental and economic researchers, projects that by the end of the century, the world population could be smaller than it is today — though that’s just one model.) And if everybody stopped having babies, the effect would be not to help humanity but to end it.

I’m not one of those people who will encourage you to imagine you’ll give birth to a child who devises a solution to the climate crisis. (What are the odds?) Still, it’s realistic to think that children who are raised with a sense of responsibility could — in personal and collective ways — be part of the solution, ensuring human survival on a livable planet by promoting adaptation, resilience and mitigation.

Probably the key question to ask is whether you can give your offspring a good prospect of a decent life. The climate crisis figures here not because your children will contribute to it but because they may suffer from it. It sounds as if you’ve already made the judgment that your kids would be all right, supplied with the necessary resources. That is, as you recognize, a privilege in our world. But the right response is not to reduce the number of children who have that privilege but to work — together — toward a situation in which every other child on the planet does, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/magazine/children-climate-change.html?smid=em-share