Amerika

A sane society has organic order. It has a hierarchy, both of its leaders, and of a position of humankind in nature. It has a sense of purpose to life that bonds the individual to the group and its cosmology. Each group consists of people who share approximately the same framework of traits, allowing cooperation without too much communication.

We in the West have not had any such thing for some time. We are ruled by the methods of bureaucracies, with committee decisions, compromise, and a procedural rule-based system which is both inhuman and tedious. Our gods are from foreign lands, our culture was abolished by diversity, and we ignore our imbalance with nature.

That imbalance takes two forms, first that we are committing The Ecocide or the slow destruction of nature by eliminating the space needed for natural ecosystems to renew themselves, and second that our way of life is unnatural, artificial, and inhuman because it is based on symbolic needs not living for the experience of life itself.

Our environmental problems have their root in our desire to not just work with nature, but to replace it with a human order because nature includes symbols like inequality that scare us. Humans are terrified of the possibility that we are unequal and can lose social status by screwing up, so we demand equality in order to keep the restive Herd quiet.

The human crusade against nature is part of our crusade against reality in general because it interferes with our solipsism. Therefore we use peer pressure to create an alternate world and enforce it on each other, rationalizing this as “good” because it is popular and inoffensive, which makes a life out of balance:

With the sheer power of its images, Koyaanisqatsi shows that the relationship between humankind, technology, and nature is a complex and multidimensional problem, and that no simple narrative that pitches “bad, polluting technology” versus “good nature” can make it justice.

People forget how influential this movie was to our educated and cutting edge thinkers in the 1980s and 1990s. As the WASP order faded and the new Leftist order based on civil rights took over, observers noted the old America slipping away and being replaced by an inferior plastic substitute.

Nothing explained all that was going wrong at once except that life was out of balance. To some degree, we need to beat back nature, because it is trying to kill us, but we do not need to subjugate it, nor can we deny the nature within, such as our need for natural selection and inequality.

With the advances in technology and development of the full consumerist state, paying tax money to the poor to buy products and pump up industry while outsourcing labor and waste to the third world, the modern world had become an empire of death.

Like in a totalitarian regime, there was only one way to succeed: be good at school, get a corporate job, and spend many hours there until you get promoted far enough to have underlings do everything for you while you golf or practice cross-dressing. This is a regime based on obedience more than competence.

You trade your youthful years for a financial payoff, which enables you to have a family and therefore, be successful biologically as well as financially, but this creates bitter people who retaliate by ignoring real problems, taking delight in the land mines they are leaving for others and future generations.

As the human population expanded, some noticed that the life out of balance was translating into ecocide because humans were using so much land that we were squeezing ecosystems into relatively small patches. In these reduced environments, they could not maintain genetic health, and were starting to become unhealthy as a prelude to extinction.

Even more, it seemed we could no longer avoid pollution and litter. Since overpopulation and urbanization are political no-go areas, the powers that be settled on “climate change” as a proxy or surrogate for actual effective activity. They wanted to talk about something that was under their control, not the wider problem.

Reducing the problem to “climate change” allows the people in power to make token changes, addressing the symbolic problem they can control while ignoring the broader issue, and they rationalize this as good because they are actually able to achieve something even if it does not of real import.

Consequently we have reached the point of writing laws that we cannot support, but which we will claim we are fulfilling with our proxy of carbon-neutral cars, energy, and products:

The UN Environment Program described environmental crises of climate change, biological diversity loss, and escalating pollution of the planet as the triple threat to human civilization, calling upon all states to “make peace with nature.”

The human right “to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is already being implemented. The UN General Assembly has recognized that this right is related to other rights and international law, and that the vast majority of states have already incorporated the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment into their national laws.

However, in most countries this basic right is not yet being enforced in courts.

How do you enforce a right to “a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” when this clashes with humanism and civil rights, namely the ability for any person to have children if they want, live wherever they want, and purchase whatever they can afford or be given government money to buy the same?

We now have eight billion humans. Guess what? Each of them wants the American suburban lifestyle or as close to it as they can get, complete with a few kids. The next stop for humanity is somewhere around twelve billion, but after that it jumps to twenty billion very quickly.

Each person requires a small space to live in, relatively, but massive spaces of roads, seaports, factories, schools, hospitals, stores, restaurants, parking lots, religious facilities, offices, bureaucracies, hotels, farms, airports, and movie theaters. For each person, we take more land for nature.

This will end in The Ecocide or the total destruction of natural biodiversity, replacing it with the type of terrain we see in city parks: a few trees, flowering shrubs, and generalists like rats, grackles, squirrels, sparrows, mice, bluejays, toads, and nutria.

Luckily, as it turns out, the climate change is killed by data that shows that we are drawing broad conclusions where we should not:

Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.

Michael Crichton called this over twenty years ago: computer models are only as good as they are complete, and like cherry-picked data, they tend to oversimplify information. When making calculations that involve periodistic or chaotic systems, this can lead to wildly inaccurate results with even a small deviation from actual figures.

When climate change dies, thankfully, we will have to talk about The Ecocide. We will also have to look more closely into how much humans have modified their environment, and think about reducing our footprint both in terms of our numbers and our behaviors:

They analyzed the data according to multiple metrics: taxonomic richness, meaning the diversity of pollen species; first appearance datum; last appearance datum; short-term gain; loss of taxa, measuring the frequency with which species appear and disappear in fossil records; and abrupt community changes, referring to species identified in the samples.

They organized their data points within 250-year time periods and on both continental and regional scales, and incorporated age-model uncertainty and accounted for differences in sample size to generate conservative estimates.

Their results indicate that vegetation changes within the last few hundred years are comparable to those accompanying the last epochal transition, including increases in first and last appearances as well as abrupt community changes.

Humans have changed Earth more than is our due; we are acting above our station, since despite being an (allegedly) intelligent species, we are one of many species, and together all of these species work in ecosystems, a kind of give-and-take tiered cascading hierarchy where the suffering of one gives to another so that all may live well.

No one doubts that. What we do not trust is reducing the wide range of human effects to one, handily measured by carbon, that offers our leaders a convenient excuse for the failure of the economy or an excuse for destroying it. Instead of cutting back the human footprint, we have selected a symbol because it is handy for manipulating others.

The carbon-fetishists do not talk about loss of ecosystems due to our runaway housing construction. They do not mention the litter and air pollution of many thousands of types. They avoid talking about the animal carnage on our roads or how we are using some trees, fish, and rare birds to the point of extinction.

To them, life is simple: reduce carbon, and then we live in paradise. Our problems are not real, they say, which is why such people always talk about “new” things and the “future”; they want you to reject what is real in favor of something that might be real, which turns out to be very convenient for them even if it is not to your benefit.

Unfortunately for the carbon-fetishists, their models are too simple to be convincing, which is why the world has not acted as one. In addition, there are alternate explanations for the consistent alterations to our climate that have nothing to do with carbon, and may in fact have origins in space where no amount of human laws can influence them:

Our planet had gone through numerous cold and warm phases, and conventional timelines suggested an ice age peaked about 900,000 years ago, Tzedakis said. Although there have been suggestions of an even earlier cold period about 1.1 million years ago, there was no hard evidence of it before now, he said.

The main reason for the cooling seems to have been astronomical: Jupiter’s gravitational influence meant that Earth’s orbit at that time was roughly circular around the sun — a circumstance associated with other cooling phases in our planet’s climate, Tzedakis said.

The shape of our orbit around the sun influences how much solar radiation we receive. A perfectly circular orbit would produce uniform sunlight; an elliptical orbit means that we get varying degrees of heat throughout the year, and when very elliptic, the orbit ensures that we get intense sun exposure in the middle and less at the extremes.

It turns out that this orbit changes because our planet experiences gravitational pull from other planets in our solar system. Depending on the position of other planets, our gravitational pull may change, and therefore Earth will experience changes in its climate.

The pattern of changing climate therefore reflects solar system history more than carbon on Earth:

The difference in the distance between Earth’s closest approach to the Sun (known as perihelion), which occurs on or about January 3 each year, and its farthest departure from the Sun (known as aphelion) on or about July 4, is currently about 5.1 million kilometers (about 3.2 million miles), a variation of 3.4 percent. That means each January, about 6.8 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth than it does each July.

When Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the Sun. Currently, Earth’s eccentricity is very slowly decreasing and is approaching its least elliptic (most circular), in a cycle that spans about 100,000 years.

Getting almost a quarter more solar radiation a year will result in a hotter climate, and to adapt to this, Earth might experience more carbon as a way of stimulating the growth of vegetation, which will then absorb and utilize the extra solar energy.

This has been going on for some time, as described by Milankovich cycles which involves periodic alterations in the solar orbit, resulting in changed climate on Earth:

Termed Milankovitch cycles, eccentricity considers the shape of Earth’s orbit changing from circular to more elliptical over 100,000 year timescales, while obliquity refers to the varying ’tilt’ of the planet’s axis between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over 41,000 years (contributing to seasons) and precession, which in simple terms is the direction Earth’s axis is pointed and can make the contrast between seasons more extreme in one hemisphere compared to the other.

While the eccentricity cycle has been a major factor thought to drive glacial/interglacial cycles, newer research has suggested that they instead may result from a series of obliquity or precession cycles (especially as the former dominated up to 800,000 years ago).

While humans work to cut carbon on Earth, they may be doing the opposite of what we need to be doing, which is to increase the amount of vegetation on Earth. That will in turn fill the atmosphere with oxygen and other gasses which might trap heat when the cycle reverses and Earth gets cooler.

If humans want to avoid an environmental crisis, the best way is to let nature manage itself, which requires we set aside half or more of the land on Earth for nature and its ecosystems to manage themselves as they have for millennia. Ironically, this requires us to stop doing what we think helps, and focus on living within nature instead.

For example, cities concentrate heat and waste while outsourcing their production and waste to far-off lands, spreading the disaster. With over half of Earth’s population residing in cities, our problem intensifies with the more people who move to the cities, and nature is harmed by the increase in human population and land use that cities afford.

As usual, the “experts” turn out to be completely wrong on this issue. Our problem cannot be limited to carbon; limiting carbon will exacerbate the problem; the solution which is obscured by carbon limits, namely setting aside half of Earth for nature, remains ignored by the various bureaucrats and experts because it requires humanity to place limits on itself.

Tags: climate change, earth orbit, environmentalism, green, milankovich cycles, the ecocide