"Sad Species. Poor Owl."

We've failed—why is it business as usual as the end approaches?

“Arundhati Roy suggests that the ‘most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times’ is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing ‘thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate’ in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.”

“Sad species. Poor Owl.”

“I often think about the Owl of Minerva—what will go through the Owl’s mind ‘as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization’?”

See my previous pieces about global heating:

• “Are People In Denial?” (29 December 2021)

• “Will We End Ourselves?” (28 April 2022)

• “Will We Choose to Die?” (1 May 2022)

• “What Fate Awaits Our Kids?” (13 May 2022)

Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom—Hegel wrote the following:

the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk

Everyone should read Noam Chomsky’s striking 2014 piece about civilization’s fate:

• “Owl of Minerva’s View: ISIS and Our Times” (5 September 2014)

Here are my notes:

• “It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.”

• “The era opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece and beyond. What is happening in this region provides painful lessons on the depths to which the species can descend.”

• “The conflicts ignited by the invasion have spread beyond and are now tearing the entire region to shreds.”

• “The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world.”

• “One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.”

• “The IPCC report reaffirms that the ‘vast majority’ of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones.”

• “A day before its summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.”

• “Arundhati Roy suggests that the ‘most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times’ is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing ‘thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate’ in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.”

• “Sad species. Poor Owl.”

Everyone should also read this shocking piece:

• “Can You Even Call Deadly Heat ‘Extreme’ Anymore?” (17 May 2022)

Here are my notes:

• “Late last month, a heat wave swallowed South Asia, bringing temperatures for one-fifth of the entire human population to 10 degrees warmer than the scenario imagined in the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson’s celebrated climate novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future,’ in which a similar event on the subcontinent quickly kills 20 million.”

• “It is now weeks later, and the heat wave continues.”

• “Real relief probably won’t come before the monsoon in June.”

• “when thermometers hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit in India and 120 in Pakistan in April, the humidity was quite low”

• “even so, in parts of India, humidity was still high enough that if the day’s peak moisture had coincided with its peak heat, the combination would have produced ‘wet-bulb temperatures’—which integrate measures of both into a single figure—already at or past the limit for human survivability”

• “Birds fell dead from the sky.”

• “In Pakistan, the heat melted enough of the Shipsher glacier to produce what’s called a ‘glacial lake outburst flood,’ destroying two power stations and the historic Hassanabad Bridge, on the road to China.”

• “On May 14, it was 51 degrees Celsius in Jacobabad, a city of almost 200,000, with a ‘wet-bulb’ reading of 33.1—just below the conventional estimate for the threshold of human survival, which is 35.”

• “More recently, scientists have suggested a lower threshold, even for the young and healthy, of just 31 degrees Celsius.”

• “just as remarkable as the intensity and duration of the South Asian heat wave is the fact that it is, already, not much of an anomaly at all”

• “A U.N. report published in April suggested that by just 2030 the world would be experiencing more than 500 major disasters each year.”

• “As recently as 2015, the 10-year average of global temperatures showed, according to the I.P.C.C., warming of 0.87 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.”

• “Just five years later, it had jumped to 1.09—25 percent higher in half a decade.”

• “just five years ago, it was exceedingly rare for more than a million acres to burn in a California wildfire season; today the record is 4.3 million acres, and in four of the past five years more than 1.5 million acres burned in the state alone”

• “Over the past decade, extreme heat events have grown 90 times more common, according to one study, compared with a baseline of frequency between 1950 and 1980.”

• “This shift is not just disorienting to lay people. The supercomputer math gets tricky, too, when warming moves so fast that any climate baseline extends for only a few years.”

• “The warming world now furnishes expectation-breaking anomalies often enough that almost whenever you find yourself dreaming bleakly you can also find a news event or data point around which to bundle that existential panic.”

• “At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the global promise was to avoid ‘dangerous’ warming. At that, we’ve transparently failed, since dangerous climate change isn’t just here already—it is growing increasingly commonplace.”

I often think about the Owl of Minerva—what will go through the Owl’s mind “as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization”?