A climate in crisis

The world of academia is starting to pick up on the concept that humanity is unknowingly cruising on a train ride to doomsday, a surefire encounter with collapse of society based upon climate crises brought on by exponential climate change. The depth of the problem: It’s inevitable and inescapable.

Nonetheless, people do not want to discuss and/or read about an impending disruption to society, especially on the scale of a collapse. Still, some academics consider it responsible and in fact necessary to communicate the issue on a pre-collapse basis in order for people to learn to support each other and to explore the radical implications well ahead of time.

Hence, the premise for Professor Jem Bendell’s brilliant seminal work, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, July 27th 2018.”

Accordingly, at the opening of the essay: “It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.”

Seemingly, Professor Bendell is going out on a limb by calling for ecosystem catastrophes followed by social collapse within current lifetimes. Few, if any, academicians dare make such a prediction, and the few that do risk loss of jobs, grant funding, and renunciation by colleagues.

Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in a interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! admitted that climate scientists low-ball their findings, often times to protect grant funding.

Anderson: “Yet so far we simply have not been prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts openly… many are ultimately choosing to censor their own research.”

Therein scientists unwittingly do the handiwork, in part, for fossil fuel companies and for America’s entrenched global warming denial brand of politics, led by President Trump and the entire Republican Party. They do not believe in human-caused global warming.

Bendell carefully reviewed the scientific literature as well as accessing

research institutions to get to the bottom of the current status of climate change. What he discovered is basic to his conviction that society is headed for a train wreck of enormous proportions; thus diametrically opposite America’s stated position on global warming.

After focusing on data, especially since 2014, it became crystal clear that the climate is undergoing a sea change like never before because of its non-linear credentials. To quote Bendell: “Non-linear changes are central importance to understanding climate change based on linear projections and that the changes no longer correlate with the rate of anthropogenic carbon emissions. In other words – ‘runaway climate change’.”

Bendell’s research uncovered the chilling fact that several non-mainstream climate scientists of stature believe climate change is no longer simply change in the abstract. Rather, it is an ongoing crisis with real time dimensions and substance that is unavoidably dangerous for society. And, it’s possible, but not proven, that the dye is cast.

Bendell’s Deep Adaptation is a wake up call for those who dismiss the dark side of the climate crisis. On the lighter side, it is only too evident that mainstream science is too slow and conservative.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘The End of the Line – A Climate in Crisis’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org