There was a recent post on Mastodon talking about this year's 0.4 C increase in sea surface temperature and why this is grounds to freak out.
I read it, and wished with my whole being that people would start applying science to the whole of the problem.
The ocean temperature data is the best science; international, interdisciplinary, broad in its data sources and consideration, actively and dynamically scrutinized, this is exemplary stuff. The problem is not the temperature data or the emerging modelling or the projections; the problem is that none of this stuff is information—information causes change—to the sources of the problem. If anybody is looking at that half, one doesn't hear about it. "Why this preference for mass extinction, decreased planetary habitability, and possible human extinction over not getting richer at the maximum possible rate?"
To a first approximation, everyone making decisions about fossil carbon uses as their sole metric "What makes me the most money tomorrow?". (Maybe next year. Certainly not longer than that.)
That's it; that's the sole consideration. It doesn't matter what any of the material consequences are, because that's not information. The only things admitted to the decision making process are amounts of money. Fossil carbon forming the basis of military power, this decision making process turns out to constrain everything.
Everything else—anti-woke agendas, political supremacy movements, the movement to enslave everyone—are consequences of or social cover for that decision making process. (Which is utterly repellant to primate notions of fairness, anybody who wants their posterity to survive, and so on. It does need hiding.)
Any structural solution for any of the immediate, pressing, human scale problems must start with the decision making about fossil carbon, and it needs to be as simple or simpler than "what makes me the most money tomorrow?"
My take is "no slaves" and "everyone or no one". Income and asset caps, democratic institutions absent the corrosive effects of concentrated money, and aggressive and immediate decarbonization are easy to argue from those axioms. That might be enough structural change to permit a prosperous future.
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