Underneath the Palm Trees

I spent a lot of hours on this guy – custom 1 ½ foot Octopus for a customers home 🐙💭💛full color all done with prismacolor basics & a prismacolor fine-line pen. Success 🖖🏼

“Sometimes you have to let everything go — purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything — whatever is bringing you down — get rid of it. Because you will find that when you are free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.”

This article will require that you get a bowl of cheerios and a glass of wine, sit in a chair with the blanket around you and your dog or cat next to you, and just zone out. It’s frightening, but it’s not sci-fi (or cli-fi). It’s based on what the scientists are telling us, if we read the actual IPCC report and not just the “what we worry?” summary.

Excerpt:

The new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.

By and large the consensus is the same: We are on track for four degrees of warming, more than twice as much as most scientists believe is possible to endure without inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions or threatening at least parts of the social and political infrastructure we call, grandly, “civilization.” The only thing that changed, this week, is that the scientists, finally, have hit the panic button.

Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one.

At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.