I listened to climate scientist Michael Mann on NPR's Science Friday about how past climate events suggest that it's not "too late" to arrest irreversible climate change. You can listen to it here.

A couple of comments. I'm going to have to do a deeper dive on Mann's claim that the oceans will become some vast carbon sink once we stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that the oceans do absorb a lot of CO2, but it's an equilibrium process and it's not clear to me how it would do enough to slow catastrophic warming. It seems to suggest that the ocean's being this extraordinary carbon sink would turn Earth into a snowball, eventually absorbing all the CO2 that has generally prevented that condition. So I'm unpersuaded, but happy to be wrong, if I am.

But it's not just climate change that's propelling us toward a cliff. It's the destruction of the natural world. The human population is vastly larger than the rest of the planetary biosphere can support, and we're witnessing the sixth mass extinction in our efforts to keep supporting it.

The other significant part of Mann's pitch is the pushback against "doom-ism," presumably people like me. I get where he's coming from, because there are people who seem to advocate doing nothing because it's too late to avoid a collapse. Why inconvenience ourselves, it's all going to hell anyway?

But that view is unsustainable as well.

For months now, I've been wrestling with this kind of "existential dread" slash "despair." We have failed everyone on this planet. I've failed my children and now my grandchildren. Much of my adult life was as a professional trained to identify threats and prepare to meet them. To protect my country, my shipmates and my family. And I saw the threat. I knew what we faced, the risks, the stakes. It wasn't until recently that I think I had a full appreciation of them, but I knew enough to know that we are in a great deal of trouble.

It wasn't enough.

But I've come to also understand that there are dynamics at play that are beyond our ability to control. We are not the rational beings we flatter ourselves to believe. You do your best, and the rest isn't up to you. Trying to know what "your best" is, and how to ensure you're doing it is challenge enough. You don't cling to outcomes. Non-attachment to results.

The future is always uncertain. And the sad reality is that each and every one of us is born to die. It is how we live where we make that life meaningful.

So despair is not an option. We must confront reality and allow it to inform the choices we make. We can't pretend that it's something else, because then we're making our choices based on a fiction, something meaningless. And that truly is something to despair over.

We meet this moment by calling on the best in ourselves, regardless of what the outcome may be. We find the best in ourselves by knowing what we're facing.

Here's a bit of cheese for you this morning, from a future that was twenty years ago:

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting... for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Neo: Because I choose to.

The only power we have is the power to choose. Life is meaningless. We bring meaning to life. It is in the act of choosing that we make meaning. And for those choices to have any real power, we must know what we're choosing.

We meet this moment with love. Love is faith in action. We meet this moment by doing the best that we can, even if it's not enough. Because it is enough. Our charge is not to preserve this civilization, it is to love one another. To serve one another. To sacrifice for one another. Not to feel sorry for ourselves, to indulge our appetites.

We must look to each other, call upon one another, to work together and do our best. And for now, that means we have to try. To stop the assault on our planet. To reduce as much suffering as possible. To restore what we can. To preserve what we can. To avoid needless destruction. To prevent unnecessary suffering.

"Doom-ism" isn't about giving up. It's about getting up.

"Get up, Neo."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:51 Saturday, 23 September 2023