This Week in Our Uncontrollably Warming Planet

Another week, another onslaught of news about how catastrophically fucked our human-stuffed toaster of a planet is. News that everyone promptly and casually ignored. How could they not? There's so damn much of it, this terrible, boring stuff. So many reports and studies and stories of climbing temps and melting Arctic ice and people-killing storms.

If we could properly process all the dire warnings that our climate is spiraling away from human-friendly habitation levels, our heads would explode. Or society would descend into a debauched bacchanalia, with looting and drugs and the kind of sex parties the Republicans always feared we'd have if we forgot about God long enough because what's the point of rules when the earth is melting?

Or maybe we'd try to fix stuff.

Either way. This week alone saw at least three or four headline-making climate reports that would considered be utterly blood-curdling if they were anything but climate reports. First, scientists in Oregon discovered, by reconstructing an unprecedented 11,000-year record of planetary temperatures, that it's hotter now than it has been in 4,000 years. And it's totally, absolutely, no-doubt-left-in-the-room, humanity's fault.

Just look at the graph below. It used to be called the hockey stick, and soon it's going to look more like somebody stepped on a rake. You know, in that comical way that would happen to cartoon characters, when it would hit them in the face and boy-yoy-yoing! and their faces would turn red and Jerry would get away, except it's not Tom getting hit in the face, it's human civilization.

Still with me? Here's the newly constructed 11,000-year temperature record. Previously, we'd only been able to look at 2,000 years back or so. And that was enough to show that industrial carbon-spewing was preternaturally heating the globe. Now it's all but ironclad. If you deny climate change at this point, either your love of Fox News eclipses your capacity for rational thought, or you are just kind of an idiot. Sorry.

You know what this graph means? It means, and I quote the scientists, "the end of an era of stable climate." THE END OF AN ERA OF STABLE CLIMATE. Does that sound more frightening in all-caps? Just trying some shit out. Please let me know in the comments below if you were more or less alarmed by the all-caps messaging, and if you subsequently paid more or less attention to the scientifically-validated crisis that is currently threatening to scorch your children. Anywho, I hope you all have enjoyed this era of stable climate, everyone, and that you have memorized some anecdotes to tell your grandchildren about it. Because it will probably be gone by the time they grow up.

Second, we got a report from the government's top climate agency that revealed that last year saw the biggest worldwide jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since 1998. As in, we have not slowed down our carbon-dumping habits one bit, even in the face of this ne plus ultra of existential crises. As in we're now sitting pretty with carbon dioxide making up 395 parts per million of our atmosphere, reflecting back simply far too much sunlight, and yes, recall that the climatologists say the safe number is closer to 350 ppm.

And that means that we have done absolutely nothing to pivot our teeming little society back towards stability; not even an inch. We have not stopped burning coal and oil and gas, we have not stopped churning out plastic crap and we have not stopped chopping down rainforests to make room for more methane-spewing cattle. We are reading reports about the incoming apocalypse and doing our part to make it more apocalyptic. Oh well!

Thirdly, we now know that sometime around 2040—less than thirty years away!—if you want to steer your boat directly over the North Pole in the summertime, you will be able to do exactly that, most likely, because it will be all melted away by then. You see, Arctic sea ice is melting away faster than Donald Trump's hairline. But like Donald Trump's hairline, it's often obscured, but by non-permanent ice volume instead of a heinous combover.

Stuff that melts away in the summer and freezes again in the winter, so it looks like it's healthier than it is. But soon, almost the whole thing will be non-permanent ice, which is lucky for the shipping industry because it now has a clear shot to Europe and China, and oil companies, who want to drill for more oil to cause more climate change, but there's just too much pesky ice up there right now. Imagine a permanently bald Donald Trump, and shudder, and laugh in the face of the absurd perversity of it all.

Laugh, laugh, laugh away, like these investors, who are rich, and therefore protected from the worst effects of our angry toaster planet, and who are looking for "investment opportunities" in a warming world. These include vaccines for dengue, the tropical disease carried by mosquitos, which is an increasing problem in the United States as more mosquitos mistake Florida and Texas for the tropics.

Or how about prospecting for gold in Greenland? It's nearly possible, because that Trump-hair ice is melting away. Or how about Dutch flood-protection technology? That's bound to be a sound investment—coastal cities around the globe need to buck up their banks. Or maybe the hedge funders will opt for "weather derivatives," a commodity comprised of exactly what it sounds like, and just as morally bankrupt.

This is what we learned about climate change this week. That this level of warming is unprecedented over the last 4,000 years. That we are continuing to dump CO2 into the sky at an accelerating rate. That atmospheric CO2 has reached 395 ppm. That we have thirty years to go before there's not enough ice in the Arctic to stand on. That rich white guys are already salivating at the raft of new investments they might make on the back of the shit luck of the rest of the planet. It's too bad they don't have the cash to invest in top notch Dutch flood protection tech in Bangladesh.

Stuff all of that into your brain for a second, suck on it like a musky ball of chewing tobacco. Deal with it. This is the near-future world.

There's a fun trick that the climate deniers try to do where they call people who understand peer-reviewed science "alarmists." Maybe one of them will comment on this article. So here, I will pre-empt them. Yep, I'm an alarmist. Because if you're not, you're a fucking idiot.