'The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here's What Happens If You Try.'

[appalachiablue]

- Peter Kalmus and Sharon Kunde at their home in Altadena, California.
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- 'The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.'- ProPublica, Jan. 25, 2021.
A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Peter Kalmus, out of his mind, stumbled back toward the car. It was all happening. All the stuff he’d been trying to get others to see, and failing to get others to see — it was all here. The day before, when his family started their Labor Day backpacking trip along the oak-lined dry creek bed in Romero Canyon, in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, the temperature had been 105 degrees. Now it was 110 degrees, and under his backpack, his “large mammalian self,” as Peter called his body, was more than just overheating. He was melting down.

Everything felt wrong. His brain felt wrong and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on the planet felt wrong, off-kilter, in the wrong place.

Nearing the trailhead, Peter’s mind death-spiralled: What’s next summer going to bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed that the temperature would only rise per decade by a few tenths of a degree Celsius. But those tenths would add up and the extreme temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s big mammal body could handle 100 degrees, sort of, 110 drove him crazy. That was just not a friendly climate for a human. 110 degrees was hostile, an alien planet. Lizards fried, right there on the rocks. Elsewhere, songbirds fell out of the sky. There was more human conflict, just as the researchers promised. Not outright violence, not here, not yet.

But Peter’s kids were pissed and his wife was pissed and the salience that he’d so desperately wanted others to feel — “salience” being the term of choice in the climate community for the gut-level understanding that climate change isn’t going to be a problem in the future, it is a crisis now — that salience was here. The full catastrophe was here (both in the planetary and the Zorba the Greek sense: “Wife. Children. House. Everything. The full catastrophe”). To cool down, Peter, a climate scientist who studied coral reefs, had stood in a stream for an hour, like a man might stand at a morgue waiting to identify a loved one’s body, irritated by his powerlessness, massively depressed. He found no thrill in the fact that he’d been right. Sharon Kunde, Peter’s wife, found no thrill in the situation either, though her body felt fine.

It was just hot … OK, very hot. Her husband was decompensating. The trip sucked. “I was losing it,” Peter later recalled as we sat on their front porch on a far-too-warm November afternoon in Altadena, California, just below the San Gabriel Mountains. “Yeah,” Sharon said. “Losing my grip.” “Yeah.” “Poor Sharon is the closest person to me, and I share everything with her.” Sometimes everything is both too much and not enough. George Marshall opened his book, “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change,” with the parable of Jan Karski, a young Polish resistance fighter who, in 1943, met in person with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was both a Jew and widely regarded as one of the great minds of his generation.

Karski briefed the justice on what he’d seen firsthand: the pillage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Belzec death camp. Afterward, Frankfurter said, “I do not believe you.”...

More,
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try
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*THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION, A Warming Planet and a Shifting Population. Food scarcity and rising temperatures have already begun to reshape how and where people live. ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, examine the implications. https://www.propublica.org/series/the-great-climate-migration

[mr_lebowski]

1. I don't mean to make light, but that photo ... man ...

If there was ever a photo begging for the caption 'The Unhappy Couple' ... it's that one. You couldn't take a picture that looks more like 'we're in the middle of a big argument' is what I'm saying.

I'm reading the article now ...

[MLAA]

2. One of the best things we can do to help is to go to a plant based diet.

Best for the planet, best for our health and best for the animals.

[cilla4progress]

3. I've been imagining the day

when some huge proportion of now-living populations are wiped out, when life reaches a new balance on this beautiful blue marble, and scientists re-enliven the fertilized eggs of white rhinoceros and other species preserved for the after times!

Only thing that gets me through.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. All I can think is: No sane person would

go back-packing in that kind of temperature.

[LizBeth]

5. My oldest son is Peter. Only 25 and feel for him so much of his youth is spent on this.

And I agree about the hostile 110.