July 10 2024 Our Revels Now Are Ended: We Need the Green New Deal Now, Or This Will Be the Coolest Summer Of All Our Tomorrows
I write to you now from Dollhouse Park, my cottage and refuge from the world between adventures, set among two acres of roses and tea gardens on a hill overlooking the lights of the city among alpine forests fifty miles from the Canadian border and within an hour’s drive of five ski resorts where once I could rely on forty feet of snow in the mountains in winter, a wetlands at the foot of my hill, an underground sea of near limitless glacial water just beneath the surface and ringed with lakes so deep the Navy has a submarine training base at one just across the border with Idaho.
Dolly wanted a park, hence the name; I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
As photography is my art and the gardens at Dollhouse Park are my subject, I have a record in albums by month on FaceBook over some years, and for two years now we have had very hard winters in terms of damage to our roses, which number over a hundred of various kinds. Though the snow has been only six or eight inches a few times a year rather than two to four feet as it used to be, and the icy winds no longer desiccate everything with fierce storms during November, the transition between seasons is now too rapid to give the roses time to harden for winter, so they all died back to the ground this year and only started blooming the last week of June instead of May, and in the spring our fruit trees didn’t have time to be pollinated by our bumblebees, so our Montmorency and Rainier cherries are fine but we have no apples or Italian plums.
If the crops die, what will we eat? And globally they are beginning to die, hammered by heat, fire, drought, and floods, and we humans will one day become extinct.
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
One day the seas will die and boil, the coastal cities will be submerged and forgotten, and we will be adrift among a raging lifeless toxic soup of megastorms. What remains of us will be consumed by fire tornados as our world becomes an arid moonscape without water to drink or air to breathe.
On the day the last of us die, proudly trumpeting our splendid dominance of nature, what use will our castles be? From what will our arsenals of death and war protect us? Who will cherish and remember the beauty of our arts and the glory of our triumphs?
All of this is beginning now, not in a distant future. I had predicted 2041 as the threshold event year from which no escape is possible, but it has happened already in 2023 as the world’s mighty debated what can be done and did nothing, as we the people failed to purge our destroyers from among us and abandon the technology which is killing us.
This will be the coolest summer to come in our future. How hot it gets and how quickly may yet be controllable if we act now to abandon fossil fuels.
My hope now is that my roses will live on after me, and I will never need to mourn their passing, or that of the blue heron who reigns over the kingdom of the frogs at the foot of my hill.
Who will remember us, when humankind is gone?
As written in 1817 by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ozymandias;
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As written by Ajit Niranjan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows
Copernicus Climate Change Service says results a ‘large and continuing shift’ in the climate; “The world has baked for 12 consecutive months in temperatures 1.5C (2.7F) greater than their average before the fossil fuel era, new data shows.
Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, scientists found, creating a year-long stretch in which the Earth was 1.64C hotter than in preindustrial times.
The findings do not mean world leaders have already failed to honour their promises to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of the century – a target that is measured in decadal averages rather than single years – but that scorching heat will have exposed more people to violent weather. A sustained rise in temperatures above this level also increases the risk of uncertain but catastrophic tipping points.
Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which analysed the data, said the results were not a statistical oddity but a “large and continuing shift” in the climate.
“Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” he said. “This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Copernicus, a scientific organisation that belongs to the EU’s space programme, uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to track key climate metrics. It found June 2024 was hotter than any other June on record and was the 12th month in a row with temperatures 1.5C greater than their average between 1850 and 1900.
Because temperatures in some months had “relatively small margins” above 1.5C, the scientists said, datasets from other climate agencies may not confirm the 12-month temperature streak.
Whether pumped out the chimney of a coal-burning power plant or ejected from the exhaust pipe of a passenger plane, each carbon molecule clogging the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat and warps weather. The hotter the planet gets, the less people and ecosystems can adapt.
“This is not good news at all,” said Aditi Mukherji, a director at research institute CGIAR and co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. “We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming – and at 1.5C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.”
Some ecosystems are more vulnerable than others. In its latest review of the science, the IPCC found that 1.5C of warming will kill off 70-90% of tropical coral reefs, while warming of 2C will wipe them out almost entirely.
A Guardian survey of hundreds of IPCC authors this year found three-quarters expect the planet to heat by at least 2.5C by 2100, with about half of the scientists expecting temperatures above 3C. The increments sound small but can mean the difference between widespread human suffering and “semi-dystopian” futures.
Mukherji compared 1C of global heating to a mild fever and 1.5C a medium-to-high grade fever. “Now imagine a human body with [that] temperature for years. Will that person function normally any more?”
“That’s currently our Earth system,” she added. “It is a crisis.”
François Gemenne, an IPCC author and director of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liège, said the climate crisis is not a binary issue. “It is not 1.5C or death – every 0.1C matters a great deal because we’re talking about global average temperatures, which translate into massive temperature gaps locally.”
Even in a best-case scenario, he said, people need to prepare for a warmer world and “beef up” response plans. “Adaptation is not an admission that our current efforts are useless.”
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire.;
The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here follows the McKie essay and Pronouncement of Our Doom:
“The world has just gone through a remarkable experience. It endured the hottest week ever recorded between 3-10 July this year. And meteorologists say there is more to come – a lot more.
Soaring levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an unusual band of strong winds that have hovered high over the Atlantic have already triggered heatwaves in Texas, Greece, Spain, Italy, and a host of other nations.
Red weather alerts have been issued across Europe; wildfires are raging in Croatia, on the Adriatic coast, and in Navarra in Spain; while tourist targets such as the Acropolis have been closed as temperatures have soared into the forties.
The Earth has not experienced anything like it since instrumental measures of air temperatures began in the 1850s, the World Meteorological Organisation revealed last week. “We are in uncharted territory and that is worrying news for the planet,” said Prof Christopher Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
This point was backed by Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University. “The chances are that the month of July will be the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian [interglacial period], which is some 120,000 years ago.”
On top of the triggers of the current record-breaking heatwaves, a growing El Niño event in the Pacific is beginning to make its presence felt across the globe.
El Niño is a periodic climatic event that occurs when the circulation of the equatorial Pacific Ocean shifts and its temperature rises, causing knock-on heat impacts around the world.
“A typical El Niño temporarily adds about 0.2C to average global temperature,” said Jeff Knight, manager of climate variability modelling, for the Met Office.
“This increase is dwarfed by the 1.2C that we have seen from climate change since the Industrial Revolution but added to that human-induced warming, a new global temperature record is still likely to be set before the end of next year.”
As a result, many scientists warn that this year or next could see world temperatures pass the 1.5C threshold that was set by the IPCC as being the upper limit for a rise in global warming that would avoid the planet passing through meteorological tipping points that could bring irreversible changes to world weather patterns.
The consequences of a new record heatwave occurring very soon will be profound and dangerous, add scientists. More than 61,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the soaring temperatures that gripped Europe last summer.
Given the likelihood of that record being broken this year – or next year at the latest – there is a strong chance that 2022’s grim death toll will be topped very soon with Mediterranean nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy likely to suffer the worst consequences.
According to UN secretary general António Guterres “climate change is out of control”. He warned that if the world persisted in delaying key measures needed to limit fossil fuel emissions, it would move “into a catastrophic situation”.
Many scientists have reacted to this alarm with rueful resignation. They have warned for more than 30 years that continued burning of fossil fuels would trigger the heatwaves that we are now experiencing.
“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter, told the BBC. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever-more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Pronouncement of Our Doom; it will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered
Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows
This will be the coolest summer to come in our future. How hot it gets and how quickly may yet be controllable if we act now to abandon fossil fuels.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1018415892998531&set=a.215527443287384
One day the seas will boil, the coastal cities will flood, and we will be adrift among a raging lifeless toxic soup of megastorms.
Hurricane Beryl supercharged by ‘crazy’ ocean temperatures, experts say
Devastation as world’s biggest wetland burns: ‘those that cannot run don’t stand a chance’
Antidotes to despair’: five things we’ve learned from the world’s best climate journalists
Gahan Wilson’s Omni magazine cartoon of 1971
Gardens at Dollhouse Park, albums from 2022-4
(click photo to enlarge. To reach from FB, click photos, then albums)
If you send me a friend request, message me; why do you want to share posts and be friends? If we know each other, please remind me how. I receive such requests from people I do not know, whose profiles have no history; this makes me suspicious as to motives and true identity . I normally regard such contacts out of nowhere as representing the intelligence services of tyrants whom I have annoyed, and I have tried, as Harley Quinn says in Suicide Squad, to be quite vexing to authorities.
But I am very interested in building networks of social action throughout the world in the causes of democracy and our universal human rights; liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and against fascism and tyranny.
May 2022 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.861688481893147&type=3
June 2022 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.891933752201953&type=3
July 2022 Gardens of Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.908627490532579&type=3
August 2022 Gardens of Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.944980653563929&type=3
September 2022 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.959197142142280&type=3
October 2022 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.984009366327724&type=3
2023
Gardens at Dollhouse Park May 2023
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1149296356465690&type=3
June 2023 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1174569550605037&type=3
July 2023 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1191270415601617&type=3
August 2023 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1212205896841402&type=3
September 2023 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1243477237047601&type=3
October 2023 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1245103043551687&type=3
2024
May 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1382008909861099&type=3
June 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1401696954558961&type=3
July 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1434229447972378&type=3
Gertrude Jekyll, a reading list
Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life, Judith B. Tankard
The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, Richard Bisgrove
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178135.The_Gardens_of_Gertrude_Jekyll
Gertrude Jekyll's Lost Garden, Rosamund Wallinger
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1435093.Gertrude_Jekyll_s_Lost_Garden
Gertrude Jekyll: The Making of a Garden--Gertrude Jekyll - An Anthology, Cherry Lewis (Editor)
Penelope Hobhouse, a reading list
Garden Style, Penelope Hobhouse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1475074.Garden_Style
Penelope Hobhouse's Garden Designs, Penelope Hobhouse, Simon Johnson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1843580.Penelope_Hobhouse_s_Garden_Designs
Flower Gardens, Penelope Hobhouse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774736.Flower_Gardens
The Cutting Garden: Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers, Sarah Raven, Pia Tryde (Photographs), Penelope Hobhouse (Foreword)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1199978.The_Cutting_Garden
The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents,
Francis H. Cabot, Marianne Cabot Welch (foreword), Laurie Olin (foreword), Penelope Hobhouse (foreword)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205626594-the-greater-perfection
On Gardening, Andrew Lawson (Photographer), Penelope Hobhouse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3585686-on-gardening
The Story of Gardening, Penelope Hobhouse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1045257.The_Story_of_Gardening
In Search of Paradise: Great Gardens of the World, Penelope Hobhouse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15999.In_Search_of_Paradise