2019 - The Year The Climate Truth Bomb Finally Dropped, And We Realized The Party Was Over

[hatrack]

EDIT

More wine was poured and more people commented on the great weather (except for a sommelier who confessed sotto voce that he felt afraid), and influencers posed in the gloom on the jetty and by the swimming pool, seeing but refusing to see what was all around them: this red-raw sun, that dirty brown sky. The cognitive dissonance would have been funny had I not been so scared. It brought to mind F Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who understood more than most that decadent parties prefigure societal collapse. Had his novel The Great Gatsby been written now, the scene that day in Point Piper would not be out of place.

Returning to shore in the haze, we could have been excused for thinking we were crossing the Styx – the mystical Greek crossing into the Underworld – and in this heightened state the day seemed more than the sum of its parts. Instead it served as both an elegy for the lost world that had disappeared beyond the haze and a portent of the world to come.

EDIT

2019 is the year of suddenly. Many of us were shaken awake from our cognitive dissonance this year as our weather patterns and climate conditions become ever more extreme. When wine turns to ash in your mouth, you can’t deny the new reality anymore.

Yet some still live in a land of cognitive dissonance: the lump of coal brought to parliament; the haze over the city obscuring the flashing Christmas lights; dead bats falling from the sky because their sophisticated and highly evolved sonar systems are overheating and confused; beekeepers being traumatised and needing counselling after hearing the sounds of animals screaming as they burn to death; new types of megafires devouring entire ecosystems; the NSW premier opening a new zoo during these megafires with a commitment to “protecting wildlife”; and the prime minister disappearing without a word about the climate catastrophe – last seen boarding a business-class Jetstar flight bound for Hawaii; the Instagrammers posing on the jetty under the eye of Sauron, hoping that with the right filters, we can pretend the sky is blue.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/19/2019-wasnt-just-protests-and-fleabag-it-was-the-year-a-climate-truth-bomb-dropped

[PatrickforO]

1. Perhaps we've crossed the tipping point of realization. n/t

[FiveGoodMen]

3. I hope.

Seems like many would deny it even if they were on fire themselves.

[hatrack]

6. I think of it as the Reality Event Horizon . . .

YMMV

[ancianita]

2. Yes, it was. Thanks to climate scientists and this book.

[PoliWrangler]

4. that's a powerful article linked, good excerpts hatrack

[CrispyQ]

5. Another decade squandered.

The Republican Party could change the narrative and lack of action on the climate crisis. Instead they deny and obstruct. Voting republican is just plain stupid.

[The_jackalope]

7. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually, then suddenly."

I remember crossing the "Reality Event Horizon" (what a great label, thanks!) fifteen years ago, and never being able to dissociate back to the normal world. It happens with an almost audible "Whump!", followed by the sound of your own voice saying "Oh, fuck..."

You might spend the next decade or so trying not to spiral down into the darkness. Sometimes you succeed for a while, but inevitably there's another Conference of the Parties, and you lose your grip again.