The Next Level of the Age of Extinction

The Apocalypse Phase of Climate Change Appears To Be Heading Our Way

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See that chart above? Yesterday was the…hottest day…in recorded history. And if you think, looking at scenes from around the world, from Canada burning, to off the charts temperatures, to orange skies over Manhattan, to heat domes scorching the Southern US, to heatwaves across the globe, that’s something’s suddenly…changed…you might be right.

“Very unusual”, “worrying”, “terrifying”, and “bonkers”; the reactions of veteran scientists to the sharp increase in north Atlantic surface temperatures over the past three months. “If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate.”

Here’s another: 

‘I hope to God I am wrong, but to me, it is looking increasingly as if we have reached some sort of tipping point, with the global temperature, sea-surface temperature, ice loss, and other parameters, all going through the roof.’

Summer after summer things have been changing. Heating. Warming. The mega-scale impacts of climate change have been arriving. But — in retrospect? Slowly. Things feel different, now, all of a sudden. You can admit it, because scientists are saying so, too — it’s not just your suspicion or intuition. 2023 appears to be the year that we moved into a different phase of…Extinction. Something much more rapid, destabilized, chaotic, and frightening.

Statistic after statistic confirms it, and so too does model after model. Here’s a model that says we’ve grossly underestimated “synchronized failures” in yields, aka, crop harvests are much more vulnerable than we thought they were. Here’s another one speaking of “doom loops” in ecosystems setting in much earlier than previously imagined. Or just look at the panoply of off the charts data, from ocean temperatures, to surface temperatures, to melting ice, to how much of North America is actually on fire.

We are entering a new phase of the Age of Extinction. But which one? How to understand it?

Let me start over. Yesterday was the hottest day in recorded history — and it was the day that Britain decided to, LOL, renege on its climate pledge. Of about 11 billion pounds. That’s about 0.25% of its GDP. A minuscule sum. This is how seriously we’re taking the Age of Extinction at the moment. If the world’s richest and most powerful countries set this kind of example, what hope for the rest?

A new phase of the Age of Extinction. There are many ways to understand, to think about, the Age of Extinction.Standard caveat, no, that doesn’t mean five hundred foot tsunamis tomorrow, and we all insta-die. But it does mean…what we’re experiencing now. We were living in the pre-apocalypse. And now, it seems, we’re entering the Apocalypse Phase of the Age of Extinction.

I don’t like using that word, apocalypse. For many reasons. It invites accusations — tired ones, at this point — of alarmism (hello, alarm bells should be going off.) More than that, though, apocalypse is something that certain forces and factions crave. They invite it and sow it. Let me explain, because part of what we need to discuss isn’t just the climatics of Extinction — but the effect on civilization, which includes politics, economics, and society, too.

I watched a movie recently — Romain Gavras’ “Athena.”