The Ministry for the Future is a good read (an "Obama Reads" rec) and starts out with a terrifying theme of people, like almost everybody in this one area of I believe it was India, dying from excessive heat. Horrifying.
Oh man, as soon as I started reading this I thought of Ministry for the Future. EXCELLENT book, cannot recommend it enough. Is a novel about an imaginary/proposed political action group a little dry in parts? Sure (but it's no Three Body Problem, i'll tell you what). But so many of its ideas are so logical, so feasible, it would be amazing we haven't implemented them already were it not for that whole late stage capitalism thing.
I dunno if I'd do a book club, seeing as how I just read it this winter and also am too unsure of committing to anything in the coming months. But I would **love** to see it get some discussion going amongst the Wonketariat.
Thanks for the rec, doc. Here in ky it's not so much heat as extreme weather: tornadoes in December, months too early; heavy rain in Jan, Feb and March so the food seeds rot, now drought and more winds driving fires.
You can't get away from it: fucked climate is everywhere.
Spring in NE Ohio is pretty much on schedule, but winter was all but absent this year. What used to be four months of snow, slush, and cold lasted ~maybe~ a full month, and even that was just dribs and drabs. Its pleasant by comparison, but you know it ain't right.
I figure Chicago and other Great Lakes cities will be hosting climate refugees shortly enough. We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes, tornados are vanishingly rare, at least in the city itself, and we got all that fresh water. Heat and humidity will become more of an issue, but we only rarely get above 90 for any length of time in the summer so far. So I expect my property values to climb pretty high before the whole economy collapses.
It is a good read, but yeah, it is quickly becoming a bit too real.
Just one note: There's always a Frank. And Frank is always a somewhat redeemable selfish asshole. You'll notice a lot of similarities between the Mars Trilogy Frank and the The Ministry for the Future.
Yeah, the climate is a (web of) complex systems of feedback loops. That means there are multiple stable plateaus (this is only like 10% based on hope) in between the cascading catastrophes. Let's hope the next one after 1.5 C is closer to 2 C than 5. A decent metric for a sense of scale is that 2 C is the difference between what used to be normal and an ice age.
There's a mayor refugee wave moving from Africa into Europe right now, I tried to find out what is causing it but it looks like nobody has asked that question yet. Wouldn't surprise me if it is droughts or something similarly climate related. It could also be genocide of course, there's always a couple of those going on. Fuck me, I just want to act dumb with my friends and get drunk.
The report in the linked article is chilling. These white supremacist, Christo-fascist militias have really figured it out. The Bundy clan has been intimidating law enforcement, from the Feds down to Sheriff's deputies, for years without any consequences. At least in Idaho, it looks like the militia is winning.
The Ministry for the Future is a good read (an "Obama Reads" rec) and starts out with a terrifying theme of people, like almost everybody in this one area of I believe it was India, dying from excessive heat. Horrifying.
yes, a good read but also terrifying
as long as Jim Inhofe's snowball is alright.
And now it's sitting in my Amazon cart.
Oh man, as soon as I started reading this I thought of Ministry for the Future. EXCELLENT book, cannot recommend it enough. Is a novel about an imaginary/proposed political action group a little dry in parts? Sure (but it's no Three Body Problem, i'll tell you what). But so many of its ideas are so logical, so feasible, it would be amazing we haven't implemented them already were it not for that whole late stage capitalism thing.
I dunno if I'd do a book club, seeing as how I just read it this winter and also am too unsure of committing to anything in the coming months. But I would **love** to see it get some discussion going amongst the Wonketariat.
Thanks for the rec, doc. Here in ky it's not so much heat as extreme weather: tornadoes in December, months too early; heavy rain in Jan, Feb and March so the food seeds rot, now drought and more winds driving fires.
You can't get away from it: fucked climate is everywhere.
I'll check out The End of All Men, thanks for the tip.
I want to go back to the time when the most depressing eco-thriller I had read was Neal Stephenson's Zodiac.
Spring in NE Ohio is pretty much on schedule, but winter was all but absent this year. What used to be four months of snow, slush, and cold lasted ~maybe~ a full month, and even that was just dribs and drabs. Its pleasant by comparison, but you know it ain't right.
I figure Chicago and other Great Lakes cities will be hosting climate refugees shortly enough. We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes, tornados are vanishingly rare, at least in the city itself, and we got all that fresh water. Heat and humidity will become more of an issue, but we only rarely get above 90 for any length of time in the summer so far. So I expect my property values to climb pretty high before the whole economy collapses.
It is a good read, but yeah, it is quickly becoming a bit too real.
Just one note: There's always a Frank. And Frank is always a somewhat redeemable selfish asshole. You'll notice a lot of similarities between the Mars Trilogy Frank and the The Ministry for the Future.
Yeah, the climate is a (web of) complex systems of feedback loops. That means there are multiple stable plateaus (this is only like 10% based on hope) in between the cascading catastrophes. Let's hope the next one after 1.5 C is closer to 2 C than 5. A decent metric for a sense of scale is that 2 C is the difference between what used to be normal and an ice age.
There's a mayor refugee wave moving from Africa into Europe right now, I tried to find out what is causing it but it looks like nobody has asked that question yet. Wouldn't surprise me if it is droughts or something similarly climate related. It could also be genocide of course, there's always a couple of those going on. Fuck me, I just want to act dumb with my friends and get drunk.
The report in the linked article is chilling. These white supremacist, Christo-fascist militias have really figured it out. The Bundy clan has been intimidating law enforcement, from the Feds down to Sheriff's deputies, for years without any consequences. At least in Idaho, it looks like the militia is winning.
I am so very glad I had no children.
See also: no appreciable winter this year, therefore, no snowfall accumulation..
How about some blame to all the fools who went there in the first place?