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Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Speaking of a climate apocalypse, it is useful to consider how this modern concept compares to traditional apocalyptic theories. The Bible contains a number of statements that enable comparison between the scientific predictions of future planetary damage from global warming and the supernatural mythology of Armageddon.

I read these mythological writings in the Bible not as miraculous prophecy but rather as containing a deeply perceptive ecological vision of the consequences of human alienation from nature. Taking from these writings only what is compatible with scientific knowledge and an ecological ethic, it is helpful to use Biblical texts to place climate change in a cultural context with a strong traditional social purchase, amplifying the ethical message of the urgency of climate action.

Against this naturalistic reading, the Christian ideas of redemption, transformation and atonement are about reconciling culture and nature, religion and science, faith and reason, humanity and the earth. Salvation essentially means survival and flourishing of humanity on our planet, while damnation means the risk of collapse and extinction. The central concept of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ marks a paradigm shift from a trajectory of destruction to a path of planetary repair, a recognition that the task for humanity is to transform our broken planet into an orderly reflection of the natural heavens, as indicated in the Lord’s Prayer, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This theme of nature as the framework for salvation is reinforced in Revelation 11:18 which describes the wrath of God as the time for destroying those who destroy the earth. That means that the evil agents of the apocalypse in the Biblical vision are the human forces working to destroy the earth.

A key to reinterpreting Christianity as a natural philosophy is to see how the original good intent was corrupted by the co-option of Christianity as a security doctrine for the Roman Empire. The subsequent corrupting theme of the union of church and state with its alienated mythological dogmas entrenched the destructive separation of spirit from nature.

The ‘end of the world’ concept in Christianity is based on a mistranslation in the King James Bible, which wrongly sets the Greek word ‘aeon’ as ‘world’, when in fact aeon means age. So the religious idea of a supernatural intervention to destroy the earth at Judgement Day involves a misunderstanding, as does the rapture concept of the faithful all leaving the earth. The real meaning is a change of thinking in a new age. A big surprise about doomsday in the Bible is that Matthew 25:31-46 defines salvation as only for those who perform works of mercy, with no reference to orthodox belief.

In addition to the point above about the ecological wrath of God as an intuition of climate change as the context of the apocalypse, there are several more Biblical lines that support a naturalistic Gaian reading of the apocalypse against the reality of climate change. The prominent myth in Christianity of a fiery end to the age is expressed in 2 Peter 3:6 gave rise to the line from the Negro Spiritual O Mary Don’t You Weep ‘no more water but fire next time’, suggesting that the next global catastrophe after Noah’s Flood will involve fire.

In the Gospels, Luke 21:25 predicts the apocalypse as a time when nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Reading these texts in a climate change context is not to suggest that ancient prophets predicted the modern situation, with intensification of hurricanes and potential for sea level rise, but rather to see that the overall context of apocalyptic prediction of social collapse and transformation was grounded in perception of nature.

I remain firmly of the view that a reformation of Christianity to reconcile with science will be a major essential factor in successfully preventing climate change, due to the capacity of religious language to speak simply and powerfully to a large audience, telling a meaningful explanatory story. Such a scientific reformation can imagine Jesus Christ as global mediator, preparing the way toward a future where the core Christian values of love and truth will become the basis of social organisation, in what the Bible calls a new heaven and new earth.
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DWill

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote: In order for negative emissions to represent a significant ‘partnership’ with ongoing emissions reductions initiatives they would have to be deployed at unprecedented scales. Recent studies have highlighted that current NETs, despite their potential, are as yet, not sufficiently mature to bon e implemented at scale. Key questions exist around the efficacy and scalability of proposed NETs, their impact on the ecosystem services provided by land and ocean, human societies, strategies for adapting to a changing climate, and their governance.
First, thanks for your excellent reporting on this significant conference, which I'm afraid might highlight a relative backwardness on the part of the U.S. government. The passage above stood out as a realistic assessment of the magnitude and complexity of the task. We wouldn't expect any of this to be easily done, and it's wise not to mislead on the difficulty factor.

This is another part that caught my eye. It seems obvious to me now, but I hadn't considered that current industries will need to lead the way, adapting their expertise to the new goals, rather than to expect entirely new industries to emerge.
Along with these challenges, economic opportunities presented by NETs were also discussed at the Conference. For example, CCS requires the skills and technologies already present in the petroleum industry. Similarly, enhanced weathering would require the expertise of the mining and agricultural sectors, that together could provide negative emissions along with environmental co-benefits (soil fertilisation).
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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DWill wrote: First, thanks for your excellent reporting on this significant conference, which I'm afraid might highlight a relative backwardness on the part of the U.S. government.
Well said. I appreciate hearing what things are being discussed and in what way.
DWill wrote:current industries will need to lead the way, adapting their expertise to the new goals, rather than to expect entirely new industries to emerge.
It's a part of the way things are done these days, with good sides and bad sides resulting. Many firms try to define themselves more broadly to leverage their understanding of related parts of an industry. The good side, it seems to me, is that they understand the market and what can be sold as production from the algae. The downside is that they might have to undercut their own sales of fossil fuels to promote alternatives properly.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote:Against this naturalistic reading, the Christian ideas of redemption, transformation and atonement are about reconciling culture and nature, religion and science, faith and reason, humanity and the earth. Salvation essentially means survival and flourishing of humanity on our planet, while damnation means the risk of collapse and extinction.


My mapping of the issues would be in terms of the mindlessness of competition for imperial domination at the time of Caesar, which for the most part undercut material progress, indicating that we need to give thought to the mindlessness of today's economic expansion and look to social connection as the better path to go down.

When one way of doing social relations gains the capability to make others irrelevant, then mindlessness will inevitably proceed to convert society to that process. Imperialism was one example. Whoever was most successful at making it work would succeed, but more importantly it demanded that everything in society come under its sway so that no free cities or independent villagers could survive.

It's questionable whether consumerist capitalism has the same inexorable momentum, but it does tend to be able to outbid alternatives for the resources. Socially, though, it pushes aside neighborliness by promoting obsession with status. If it succeeds in this, then at the same time it has persuaded individual voters that they must fight for their little bit of status, and not give up any for the sake of the public good.

Orderliness seems to me to inhere in a return to neighborliness and a willingness to back off from stress and relentless pressure to allow breathing room for defense of the planet. To let system effects impinge on the mindless struggle that people treat as inevitable, and to call forth a mindful response.
Robert Tulip wrote:The ‘end of the world’ concept in Christianity is based on a mistranslation in the King James Bible, which wrongly sets the Greek word ‘aeon’ as ‘world’, when in fact aeon means age. So the religious idea of a supernatural intervention to destroy the earth at Judgement Day involves a misunderstanding, as does the rapture concept of the faithful all leaving the earth. The real meaning is a change of thinking in a new age.
This improvement of translation seems to be getting a lot of attention these days. A fair share of the revision seems to be in the direction of conceiving of the end of the age as a change in thinking, or at least of social organization.
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Robert Tulip

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The apocalyptic nature of the climate problem is proved by news of how the world is going in precisely the opposite direction from what is needed.

Cars and coal help drive 'strong' CO2 rise in 2018.

New data published on current trends shows a booming global market for cars helped drive CO2 emissions to an all-time high in 2018. The main factor in the near 3% rise has been coal use in China. Carbon emissions from cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes continue to rise around the planet. Renewables are growing, but nowhere near as fast as the CO2 rise.

The research by the Global Carbon Project (GCP), says this year's emission rise of 2.7% is much bigger than 2017's 1.6% increase, consolidating the increase from the flat CO2 emission total since 2014.

Meanwhile, President Macron of France stood like King Canute against the steady increase in use of cars. The centrality of oil, coal and steel to economic growth shows incentives for increasing carbon emissions are unstoppable.

Saving the climate by cutting emissions is as futile as removing sewage by cutting defecation. The model of emission reduction can't deliver climate security, and should be replaced by a practical sanitarian model focused on carbon removal.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Dec 05, 2018 10:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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John Ridley of Ocean Nourishment Corporation was the next speaker at the Canberra Negative Emissions Conference. He explained how links between food security, climate security and ocean acidification could be addressed through marine carbon farming. The ONC proposal is to add macronutrients to the 60% of the world ocean that is deficient in nitrogen, as explained by Daniel Harrison in his 2017 article Global negative emissions capacity of ocean macronutrient fertilization. A problem for this work is that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14, protecting the oceans, is interpreted by opponents as defining efforts to use the oceans for carbon removal as marine pollution.

The ONC aim is to increase the carbon cycle to export carbon to the deep. A site selection study was done on Australia’s North West Shelf in 2011, aiming to help make natural gas carbon neutral, potentially working with the new Shell Prelude floating gas extractor, but lack of fiscal incentives has made this unviable to date.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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We've been unintentionally geo-engineering the planet for millenia. The way to look at these proposals to repair climate is, I suppose, as intentional forms of the same geo-engineering. Still, it's going to be a difficult leap psychologically. What gives us the right to manipulate nature to this extreme? To escape the dilemma, we should ask what now gives us the right to radically alter climate by doing essentially nothing to reduce the temperature of the greenhouse.
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Robert Tulip wrote:Saving the climate by cutting emissions is as futile as removing sewage by cutting defecation.
That analogy might be worth something if there was no choice about technology to be used powering space heating, transport and manufacturing. Defecation is a one-for-one result of eating. By contrast there are many options for converting energy sources into usable power, prominently including technologies like insulation for reducing power requirements. We could have eliminated fossil fuel burning completely by now if we had set out to do so in 1992. We could certainly have contained it within tolerable limits at an affordable cost.

Use of this kind of either/or rhetoric just discredits your cause.
Robert Tulip wrote:The model of emission reduction can't deliver climate security, and should be replaced by a practical sanitarian model focused on carbon removal.
Because only one "model" is allowed at a time? This flies in the face of everything we know about production.
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DWill wrote:Probably the alternative energy source with the biggest push behind it now is solar. That gets personal with me. In our rural paradise just west of the Shenandoah Mountains, two proposals are pending for the construction of solar "farms" totaling over 900 acres. The power produced, enough to supply 25,000 homes at peak output, would go to the northern Virginia suburbs 75 miles east.
It's funny, isn't it, that people are used to taking local side-effects seriously, but want to leave global, systemic side-effects for someone else to worry about.
DWill wrote:Sentiment is running strongly against approval, but the board of supervisors still might allow it on the basis of property owners' right to dispose of their land as they choose. This area relies on agriculture and tourism for what small prosperity it has, and these solar facilities don't fit with that.
I suspect that in a normal administration, money could be found to leverage tourism that takes advantage of the solar investment. From Washingtonians coming (in school buses?) to look at where their power comes from, to a "Green Community" with borrowable bikes for exploring the area and locovore restaurants to advertise the farming community, to museums underlining the solar options currently transforming the African countryside, (which all the AID folks at Rosslyn, VA might be willing to provide technical assistance for), this could be turned into positive side-effects rather than negative. But it takes vision and planning and some talks to Congresspeople and bankers.

Of course there is some question whether people coming to see where Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart did their things would be put off by all the modern, climate-centered stuff. But somehow I don't think it needs to be either-or. They both enjoy a good bed and breakfast or an arts fair.
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Robert Tulip

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This latest short article in Nature is bad news. Global warming will happen faster than we think says the speed of warming is due to accelerate, crossing dangerous future thresholds a decade earlier than previously predicted. That means we are headed into a climate apocalypse. My only quibble with the chart below is the line "if emissions go unchecked", since it is more scientifically feasible for cooling to be delivered by carbon removal than by emission reduction. Image
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Fri Dec 07, 2018 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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