The Rising Tide

I have just begun a book called Extreme Cites, by Ashley Dawson. As I have discerned it thus far, its thesis is that the world's great coastal cities are destined for massive inundation and destruction because of rising sea levels. This likely now-irreversible fate is undergirded by the one of the central facts of contemporary capital: its rapacious appetite for continuous and unlimited growth. I won't bore you with the details except to recommend that you read the book.

Should you have neither the time nor the inclination, an article in The Guardian, about another book dealing only with American coastal inundation, can provide much useful information. It also explores the work of Harold Wanless, chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, who, in taking issue with the more conservative estimates of two to six feet sea-level rise over this century, has come to some damning conclusions about his city:

“The rate of sea level rise is currently doubling every seven years, and if it were to continue in this manner, Ponzi scheme style, we would have 205 feet of sea level rise by 2095,” he says. “And while I don’t think we are going to get that much water by the end of the century, I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that we could have something like 15 feet by then.”

Why?

Dig into geologic history and you discover this: when sea levels have risen in the past, they have usually not done so gradually, but rather in rapid surges, jumping as much as 50 feet over a short three centuries. Scientists call these events “meltwater pulses” because the near-biblical rise in the height of the ocean is directly correlated to the melting of ice and the process of deglaciation, the very events featured in the documentary footage Hal has got running on a screen above his head.

Fun fact:

From 1900 to 2000 the glacier on the screen retreated inward eight miles. From 2001 to 2010 it pulled back nine more; over a single decade the Jakobshavn glacier lost more ice than it had during the previous century. And then there is this film clip, recorded over 70 minutes, in which the glacier retreats a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. “This is why I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the largest meltwater pulse in modern human history,” Hal says.

A wealth of information and scientific studies demonstrates beyond doubt our headlong plunge toward disaster. Despite that, we argue incessantly over piddling and ineffective carbon taxes while ignoring the real work that mitigating disaster would require. It used to be said that knowledge is power. That is obviously no longer true as we choose to willfully, egregiously ignore that knowledge.

Our fate is all but sealed.

Be Skeptical. Ask Questions.

Given the very strange times in which we live, some sound advice from Jonathan Jarry:

Blessed Are The Benighted

My good friend Dave in Winnipeg often rails sardonically against the twin curses of intelligence and critical-thinking. If you start the following video at about the 50-second mark, you'll see that some have 'blessedly' been spared such affliction.

No Commentary Required

Paging King Canute

His lesson needs to be relearned, methinks.

Words Mean Little Anymore

While I realize it is not healthy to obsess over things over which I have no control, I find myself consistently astounded and dispirited by the dystopian reality we now inhabit. While the world has been deteriorating for many years, I find it hard to deal with the fact that we now live in a world which, were it a movie script, would be rejected by all major studios as so preposterous that it would have no chance of box-office success. A script that showed such complete contempt for the audience's intelligence would be a very tough sell.

And yet that is precisely the world that Donald Trump and his ilk inhabit and cultivate, a world where the president and his enablers utter the most outrageous falsehoods shamelessly and fearlessly. We have descended into a world where words have lost their meaning.

The Star's Daniel Dale keeps a running tally of Trump's mendacity which you can filter by topic. I urge you to visit the site. As well, today's Star explores this phenomenon,

the most comprehensive picture yet available of what historians say is an unprecedented avalanche of serial lying.

The following news story features Trump in his full mendacious 'glory,' his absolute contempt for truth and, by extension, people, made manifest:



Although it is likely apocryphal, the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," has never seemed more relevant or more biting.

Feeling Like An American

Now that Ontario is in the thrall of Doug Ford and his Regressive Conservative Party, I am beginning to understand how sane and balanced Americans must feel having an obscene fool as their national leader. It makes everyone look bad.

While Ford and his merry band of obsequious MPPs secured their majority thanks to a minority of voters who were filled with "passionate intensity" while the "best lacked all conviction" and chose to vote in smaller numbers, all of us, because we live in a democracy,' must bear the shame and ignominy.

The tail wags the dog here in Ontario. And make no mistake - just as Trump plays to his base, Ford et al. have every intention of tailoring their time in office to the demands of the minority who elected them. Just take a look at yesterday's Throne Speech:

The Tories will ... free police from “onerous restrictions that treat those in uniform as subjects of suspicion and scorn,” [a return to carding and loose SIU oversight?] end “unaffordable green energy contracts,” and expand beer and wine sales to convenience and big-box stores.

Ignoring the fact that extensive consultation paved the way to the revised 2015 sex-ed curriculum, this benighted new government

... will replace the 2015 “sex education curriculum with an age-appropriate one that is based on real consultation with parents.”

In a sop to the social conservatives who helped him become Tory leader in March, the new premier’s administration will use the 1998 sex education syllabus, which predates Google, same-sex marriage, and social media, until a new lesson plan is developed.

Crazed evangelical leader Charles McVety is delighted, observing that

students can now “go and learn how to tie their shoelaces and do arithmetic and read and write and do what they should be doing in school instead of learning things that belong, really, in post-graduate studies.”

Others were not so kind:

Green Leader Mike Schreiner countered that Ford has “declared war on the modern world.

“I mean, to have no climate change plan and to take our sex-ed curriculum back to 1998 is taking the province backwards,” said Schreiner.

That old curriculum was woefully antiquated, in no way addressing the problems and concerns bedeviling 21st century children:

The 1998 health and physical education curriculum describes a society that few elementary school students would recognize. It does not mention the words cyber-bullying, social media, race, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. It only once mentions the word Internet, and only to say that kids can use computers to surf the “World Wide Web” for information.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture that our 'new' government has some mighty 'old' ideas and beliefs.

On a personal note, it is very difficult for me to be anything other than contemptuous of my fellow Ontarians. But that, I suspect, will be the subject of a future post.