Ok: DA doesn’t exactly say that in this post. That was his covering email 
It’s not the most cheery read of the week but hard to fault any of the following.
tl;dr: The End Is Nigh so stop squabbling about whose fault it is
1 Like
He gets all the essentials into his first sentence: climate shift may or may not be happening; may or may not be anthropogenic, driven by recently-human-released CO2; but it doesn’t matter in any case, since our current society is bound inevitably for history’s shredder, because it’s inherently over-reaching, and thus unsustainable. Exactly so, Darren!
He is mistaken in saying Denis Rancourt hasn’t published any papers on climate, though. Maybe he should have checked Denis’ website first.
It is true that there has to be doubt about anthropogenic added-CO2 being the major cause of - constantly-shifting - climate change, and it may well turn out that it really is varying insolation due to constantly-cycling changes in the Earth’s distance from the Sun that really rules the steady, quite predictable procession of warm periods and glacial episodes in Earth climate. And it may well happen also that the current small warming episode will eventually turn out to be no more world-ending than any of the previous ones; even the ones which were very sudden - on the geological timescale.
But - he’s right: it doesn’t matter either way. Because the other issue - the resource-base crash that mandates the Long Descent - is the real clincher about what’s happening, and where we’re going.
I don’t believe he needs to be so incorrigibly apocalyptic, though. He’s right that we won’t be doing anything effectual to address - and tame - these crises. Doubtful whether we could tame and control the Earth’s fluctuations anyway, even if we could be arsed to try really seriously; which we can’t.
But there’s no need to see it all in that simplistic binary which JMGreer always deplores: either everything will be dandier and dandier forever, because harari-startrekkytechietechie; or RagnarokArmageddonApocalypse, because - well it must happen that way, mustn’t it…?
I think Greer’s timeframe, and his characterisation, are more likely; what we’ve already been experiencing for some time now, in fact: a slow. steady tightening down of multiple screws, to which we all adapt piecemeal and ad hoc, with whatever local workarounds work for the time being - until they don’t any more; then more, ever-smaller workarounds.
All this with a scattering of local disasters such as famines, revolutions, wars, etc., together with the tendency for the whole global decline to be slow and steady, but with a series of repeated sudden lurch-downs; a stepwise pattern, with intervals of respite between the lurches.
And all the crises with which we’re now beset - so presciently described in ‘The Limits To Growth’: population overshoot, peak pollution, unmaintainable levels of industrial production, food shortages, resource depletion (particularly energy) - all of these crises will resolve themselves automatically, using Gaian processes, which many of us will experience painfully, but which will have wiped away the crises ‘when the rubble stops bouncing’, entirely without the inestimable advantage of human supervision, and will then get on with the very ancient, constant process of healing and rebuilding. As so often before.
With a smaller, chastened, more simple-living population of human survivors, getting on with much less spectacularly-overprosperous lives than now, as it has to be lived by then. And all done amidst the returning (CO2-gobbling) wildernesses…
Mam Gaia, in Lynn Margulis’s vivid phrase, is “a tough bitch”, and if we little homsap farties want to survive, we will live in respectful harmony with her tough means and measures; bountifully life-defending in the end, as they always are…
PS: Already got the spirit stove and the hurricane lamp! And the home-built wood-burning rocket stove. And when the last of my turf-grown tater plants finish, soon, I’ll show y’all some pics of the life-sustaining food-bounty you can get just by minimal guerrilla gardening! 
‘All’s lost!’ urban-bourgeois angst isn’t the only posture available to face the music…
1 Like
Allen still buys into the ‘climate crisis’ stuff, which is fair enough. We all have our opinions, and I don’t shirk a debate.
What Allen doesn’t seem to appreciate is how seamlessly the covid crisis segues into the climate crisis, and the Ukraine war. All go towards a totalitarian government and a return to feudalism.
Does anyone know why we have the great British fry-up, eggs and bacon…? It is, apparently, because back in feudal days the only livestock the serfs were allowed to keep were chickens and pigs, which can be kept in small enclosures.
The rest of our green and pleasant land was given over to cattle and sheep, etc. It’s worth taking a look at the menu a medieval Lord would serve up at one of their banquets.
And talking of ‘green’…
1 Like
To paraphrase the Davos message
“…buy a new kettle, trade the car for a mule and a cart, and suck it up, peasants, cos we gotta really show Putin and those MAGA Republicans. In ten years or so it will be better, or no one will know any different. We know what you’re thinking; remember: we’ve got the best guns.”