An update on this blog’s namesake climate catastrophe
The title of this blog comes from a frustration I had, back in 2010, about the absurdly optimistic climate scenarios that were being described by politicians and pundits as “alarmist”. At that point in time, I remember people scoffing at the notion that we might see two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and most of the other effects of a warming planet, like crop failures, were largely ignored...
So I started out to write about worst-case scenarios, and the possibility of warming oceans leading to widespread anoxic conditions ... that exact scenario is the most likely cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as The Great Dying... There are a number of factors that affect how much there is, but temperature is a big one, and it’s feeding into a rise in so-called “dead zones”.
The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water... has culminated in the new Global Ocean Oxygen Decade, a project under the U.N. Global Ocean Decade (2021–2030). ..Even as we celebrated the return of humpback whales in 2020 to an increasingly clean New York Harbor and Hudson River, dead fish littered the Hudson River
I think it’s important to understand that not all life on Earth has the requirement for oxygen that is common among the organisms that surround us. Because we require an environment with a certain oxygen saturation, we simply don’t interact with life forms that rely on, for example, sulfur as an electron receptor.
ELSEWHERE IN OCEANOXIA:
If Chile is to be the grave of Neoliberalism, let this be played at its funeral!
Chile has been described as the birthplace of Neoliberalism. Specifically, it was the Pinochet regime that seized power from the democratically elected Salvadore Allende, with U.S. support, that then enacted a brutal regime of torture, murder, and privatization with the continued backing of the U.S. government, and advice from “the Chicago boys“, acolytes of Milton Friedman’s cult of The Invisible Hand of the Free Market that pioneered the ruthless profit-seeking and “marketization” of every aspect of life that has become typical of American capitalism in the decades since.
I’ll pause here to once again link you to the free audiobook of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”
