Climate change killed 10 BILLION snow crabs. Warmer water sped up the crabs’ metabolism and led to a mass starvation event. A 2023 article.
Scientists reveal how 10 billion snow crabs suddenly vanished
I should reread Desert
that or just tune out and try not to think of living in the middle of an artificial mass extinction caused by capitalism because it's too much to bear consciously weighing on your mind all the time
Thinking of all the natural world suffering so much and knowing it didn't and doesn't have to be this way hurts my soul in a way that makes it hard to want to do anything other than numb myself
Neither hedonism or revolutionary suicide are solutions and any salvageable future is gonna require an organized mass movement but with how dire things are and are accelerating and how feeble and small the left seems at this point at the same time the most craven cruel reactionary idiots are at the helm, it feels really bleak sometimes
I feel this
That seems like unbelievable amount. We're so cooked.
When I think of the typical American mindset - I think of the cliché out of sight out of mind. But what makes me even more depressed is the thought of billions of a particular creature dying in a way Americans will pay attention to. I fear that attention-grabbing horribleness will be paradoxical. The poor American response about climate change will become even worse. I can hear a Fox News talking head in my mind...
"Look, a total of billions of lobsters and crabs and other sea creatures are dying off the coast of Maine. The water got too hot and they starved to death. This is killing the fishing industry there. I talked to some republican scien— I mean, republican researchers and they said this kind of stuff could happen in other parts of the US to other animals and plants. This is a serious problem. How we gonna compete with China and beat 'em? What we gotta do and do it fast is climate engineering."
I assume words like "scientist" are woke now for the right. In any case - the right finally wants action on climate change. Of course it's entirely the wrong focus and it's entirely wrapped up in economics and flag waving.
My greatest fear with climate change, is not just that we will continue to crank up the thermostat, but that when things get bad enough it will be the US that unilaterally decides to pump sulfur into the stratosphere, put tons of microplastics up in the sky, or any of the other hair-brained mitigation ideas that have been put forward.
I have deep reservations about any of those ideas even if done in a multilateral way, carefully, backed with rigorous research, and buy in from every country on the globe. But that's not how it will happen. It's going to be some Democrat in 2075, when we've already seen four degrees of warming, trying desperately to save corn harvests.
This is only the beginning.
and when all the death becomes too much to ignore, the bourgeois superstructure will alternate between "who could have seen this coming?" and "this is the fault of your brown neighbor"
Tbf they're already started with that one