I had the delightful, horrific, and satisfying experience today of discovering that I'm an amateur.
Over the last two plus years, I've read easily more than 15,000 news stories on the converging emergencies of species collapse, climate chaos, resource depletion, infectious disease, biology breach... and oh year, recovery).
I've read 10,000 of those stories fully, read 6,000+ deeply, and personally selected about 1600 of them to record, think about, and make a joke about.
I'm more well-read about the coming attractions of the future than anyone I know, apart from my partner in crime, who's done the same thing. We're the ApocaDocs, after all -- we're documenting and joking about the horror of environmental collapse.
But today, I was put in my place.
I read an astonishing work in Nature (one of the top four science journals on any given day), entitled A safe operating space for humanity. It's available for free (thank you, Nature!), with commentary from experts.
In "A safe operating space," Rockstrom and a few dozen et alia look at nine "interlinked planetary boundaries" beyond which we cannot live on the earth. He does it with science, and with scientifically-informed suppositions (since we don't know, really, the tipping points).
Summary:
- New approach proposed for defining preconditions for human development
- Crossing certain biophysical thresholds could have disastrous consequences for humanity
- Three of nine interlinked planetary boundaries have already been overstepped
The nine "planetary boundaries" are important. This next block is worth reading slowly:
Planetary boundaries
To meet the challenge of maintaining the Holocene state, we propose a framework based on 'planetary boundaries'. These boundaries define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system and are associated with the planet's biophysical subsystems or processes. Although Earth's complex systems sometimes respond smoothly to changing pressures, it seems that this will prove to be the exception rather than the rule. Many subsystems of Earth react in a nonlinear, often abrupt, way, and are particularly sensitive around threshold levels of certain key variables. If these thresholds are crossed, then important subsystems, such as a monsoon system, could shift into a new state, often with deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans8, 9.
Most of these thresholds can be defined by a critical value for one or more control variables, such as carbon dioxide concentration. Not all processes or subsystems on Earth have well-defined thresholds, although human actions that undermine the resilience of such processes or subsystems — for example, land and water degradation — can increase the risk that thresholds will also be crossed in other processes, such as the climate system.
We have tried to identify the Earth-system processes and associated thresholds which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change. We have found nine such processes for which we believe it is necessary to define planetary boundaries: climate change; rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine); interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global freshwater use; change in land use; chemical pollution; and atmospheric aerosol loading (see Fig. 1 (linked to Nature article) and Table (ditto)).
This entire article -- and the commentary by other experts -- is well worth spending the evening reading.
Yeah, it's a little science-y. But y'know, that's one of those things that make it real.
Take a look at that amazing graphic of the problem of planetary overshoot represented in that quietly-titled "Figure 1."
At the outset of this diary I said it felt "delightful, horrific, and satisfying" to read this amazing treatise. Here's why:
Delightful -- "gosh, science is catching up with what we've been doing the last two years!" Maybe a new crop of people will be thinking about these interrelated systems.
Horrific -- "shit, you mean it probably is as bad as we thought?" Jesus, that means we all, every humanjack among us, have to sacrifice and retriple our efforts.
Satisfying -- "Hah, it is as bad as we thought!" The last two years were worth documenting. We weren't wrong to do it.
But I'll add one more:
Increasingly militant strident.
If you see and understand the problem, you have a responsibility to act to solve it, in small ways and big.
Rockstrom had to act to try to solve it. They researched it, had the science lead the way, and then he and the et als acted. So have my buddy and I, in our small, amateur's (or performer's) way.
We each must act, and then take steps to radically shift our fundamental economy, so we don't end up being cursed by our grandchildren.
Take it from this amateur -- and those experts.