You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 124 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
This is soooo basic — why don’t you get it?
This week: YOU CAN’T FIGHT PHYSICS
“What physics?” you say.
All the laws now biting our butts because of our actions: Arrhenius’s rule1, the chemistry of carbon sinks2, pH3, the Stefan-Boltzmann law (absorption, radiation, advection, emission, etc.)4, bond length and molecular geometry5, and so many more.
“I’m not fighting against those. I didn’t even know about most of them!”
You’re still allowing6 and promoting7 the dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, thus screwing the oceanic pH and pushing Stefan-Boltzmann with a vengeance, and you are actively destroying carbon sinks.8 In the battle against climate change, you are still actively fighting for it. Ignorance of the law, when we’re talking the laws of physics and climate change, is inexcusable.
“But that’s just how things are done.”
“How things are done” is the status quo of rich privateers raping the planet for profit. The status quo is killing the biosphere, destroying the lives and livelihoods of people who live here now, and establishing an apocalyptic future for your children. If the status quo doesn’t work, if it kills people and species, if it spells doom for life and for SF, why do you keep doing it?
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
Your job. Protect and preserve SF or get out.
Dear Editor,
The science on climate change is clear, so why aren’t San Francisco’s leaders listening? Why doesn’t SF have panels of climate scientists working on what the city needs to do to survive? Why do our leaders instead listen to the richest, most connected, loudest, and whitest voices while ignoring or downplaying the science? Students in our schools know more about climate change than the people our local politicians respond to. These people who have the ears of our leaders can’t change the reality of the science. Ignoring science can destroy San Francisco. When will SF’s leaders care enough about the city to actually do their jobs? When will they care enough about the future to make sure we have one?
Work with the science instead of against it.
You did it with Covid. How is a pandemic different from climate change? Climate change is bigger and worse. The science mechanisms are crystal clear and the results of your actions and inactions are screaming at you now. As the Daily Beast put it so elegantly, “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked.”9 Children are pleading for you to act.10 So ACT!
FOOTNOTES
1. “if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression” or
2. Inez Fung, Scott Doney, Keith Lindsay, and Jasmin John. “Evolution of carbon sinks in a changing climate”. PNAS. 9 August 2005. https://www.pnas.org/content/102/32/11201.
3. Rosemary Sullivant. “Climate Change Seeps into the Sea”. NASA. 21 October 2008. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_acidocean.html.
4. Stephen Schwartz. “Earth’s Climate, The Greenhouse Effect, and Energy”. Brookhaven National Laboratory. 7 January 2008. https://www.bnl.gov/envsci/schwartz/pres/EarthClimateBNLmini-semW.pdf.
5. Sarah Fecht. “How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming?” State of the Planet. 25 February 2021. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/.
6. Uber. Lyft. Missing mass transit and insanely slow mass transit projects. Allowing and even encouraging continued use of cars in SF (we’re not even going to mention Vision Zero here).
7. The “reopening” of the Great Hwy to cars. The diesel-spewing carousel in GG Park. The Manhattanization of SF with polluting construction techniques and nonexistent oversight.
8. The Delta Tunnel and the lawsuits where SF sides with big ag against the bay’s ecosystems.
9. Barbie Latza Nadeau. “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked”. Daily Beast. 9 August 2021. https://www.thedailybeast.com/un-climate-experts-to-the-world-were-already-fucked.
10. David Wallace-Wells. “It’s Greta’s World But it’s still burning. The extraordinary rise of a 16-year-old, and her Hail Mary climate movement.” New York Magazine. 17 September 2019. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/greta-thunberg-climate-change-movement.html.