Beyond Repair
17 October 2022 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI went to put on my cashmere jumper (which has basically had to be darned every single time I have worn it) and discovered that it had acquired a whole new crop of much larger holes up the sleeve which it is obviously quite pointless to repair. Probably moth damage, although there are no tell-tale cocoons, because the holes are just so big compared to the ones which were appearing previously. So I shall have to ditch it, as the arm has basically been perforated off at the shoulder.
I'm not all that sorry, because although it is so fine as to be a useful under-layer beneath other things, it really was getting a bit wearing to be constantly repairing it before every outing. (I then had to darn up a hole which had appeared just before the cuff of the jumper I put on to replace it... but that one again was a garment I acquired for free because it needed mending before I ever set eyes on it, so I really have no justification for my constant wail of why is everything I own always broken?)
A fairly apocalyptic final episode of "Frozen Planet II" last night, in which the BBC film team demonstrated the scale of the climate damage which is happening *right now*, never mind accelerating into the future. Despite David Attenborough's concluding call to arms of 'We need to do something immediately', the unintended message I took away is that it is basically too late already. It doesn't matter how many discarded garments I darn up for a few years' continued function; the habitat destruction we are seeing now is the consequence of actions that were taken a hundred years ago, and our current actions will continue to escalate extinction into the foreseeable future. Nobody is talking about reducing the Earth's temperature below the levels that are already causing distress -- the most distant hope that is available is that humanity *might* be able to limit the increase to only another 0.5C, and that is looking increasingly unfeasible.
So the seals that give birth on the Arctic ice are going to die off when, in the near future, there is no sea ice during the breeding season. The penguins whose chicks are fatally soaked by meltwater will continue to vanish from the colonies they once inhabited. The albatrosses will fail to reproduce at all, because the sexually mature adults are bonding for life with the wrong partners in an absence of females. And we can't 'do something' about any of this, because the forces unleashed have a massive lead-time between cause and effect and the consequences are way beyond our control.
We can -- possibly -- reduce global warming to 'only' 1.5C. But that will be far too much for the animals (and humans) adapted to ecosystems that are at the best of times at the outer edge of what it is possible for living beings to survive. The increase we have already seen is already too much.
I'm not all that sorry, because although it is so fine as to be a useful under-layer beneath other things, it really was getting a bit wearing to be constantly repairing it before every outing. (I then had to darn up a hole which had appeared just before the cuff of the jumper I put on to replace it... but that one again was a garment I acquired for free because it needed mending before I ever set eyes on it, so I really have no justification for my constant wail of why is everything I own always broken?)
A fairly apocalyptic final episode of "Frozen Planet II" last night, in which the BBC film team demonstrated the scale of the climate damage which is happening *right now*, never mind accelerating into the future. Despite David Attenborough's concluding call to arms of 'We need to do something immediately', the unintended message I took away is that it is basically too late already. It doesn't matter how many discarded garments I darn up for a few years' continued function; the habitat destruction we are seeing now is the consequence of actions that were taken a hundred years ago, and our current actions will continue to escalate extinction into the foreseeable future. Nobody is talking about reducing the Earth's temperature below the levels that are already causing distress -- the most distant hope that is available is that humanity *might* be able to limit the increase to only another 0.5C, and that is looking increasingly unfeasible.
So the seals that give birth on the Arctic ice are going to die off when, in the near future, there is no sea ice during the breeding season. The penguins whose chicks are fatally soaked by meltwater will continue to vanish from the colonies they once inhabited. The albatrosses will fail to reproduce at all, because the sexually mature adults are bonding for life with the wrong partners in an absence of females. And we can't 'do something' about any of this, because the forces unleashed have a massive lead-time between cause and effect and the consequences are way beyond our control.
We can -- possibly -- reduce global warming to 'only' 1.5C. But that will be far too much for the animals (and humans) adapted to ecosystems that are at the best of times at the outer edge of what it is possible for living beings to survive. The increase we have already seen is already too much.