As you may have heard, The Amazon Rainforest is on fire.
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro ran on a platform of developing the rainforest for ranchers and farmers. As president, he rolled back protections that prevented developing the rainforest. When the head of Brazil’s space reasearch center reported that there was massive deforestation happening because of development, Bolsonaro fired him.
When it was revealed that fires in the Amazon were up 83% over last year and were the worst since we started counting them, Bolsonaro said that it’s just because it’s the “burn season.” Obviously, it’s an explanation which falsely equates all burning as being the same and dodges the question of why there’s so much more of it under his administration.
But the only reason Bolsonaro doesn’t talk about it is because it’s harder for people to stop what he’s doing when he won’t even admit he’s doing it. I guess I can earmark a later episode for how we’re in the endgame of dishonest politicians and only fools would believe they could discern the lies from the truth, but today we’re talking about the Amazon and climate change.
Folks have been, reasonably, upset about it. I mean, for starters, the biodiversity of the Amazonian rainforest is of scientific value and there could be life forms in there that are worth studying and which could provide us with scientific insight.
Also, people live there and when the G7, a collection of mostly European nations, resolved to pledge money to help protect the Amazon Bolsonaro called it “colonialism.” When you consider he’s a Portugese-speaking Roman Catholic who is literally allowing the destruction of the homes of indigeneous peoples, you realize the exact kind of high-art trolling this generation of Micro-Mussolini’s are capable of. If there was any artistic intent or even basic intelligence behind it, I’d respect it a little, but it’s just naked, cynical solipsism so fuck him.
So again, he’s claiming he totally wants to fight the Amazon fires, but ooooh, he just won’t take European aid money because the Pwesident of Fwance was mean to him. Trust me, I’m sure Bolsonaro would have started putting out those fires and stopping the development if Emmanuel Macron hadn’t so said something as vicious and imperial as--lemme check my notes--
*french accent* that the burning of the Amazon is worth discussing at the G7 conference
I assume the original French is fucking savage beyond the ability of this simple yankee to comprehend.
Photosynthesis
But anyway, some of the freaking out is misplaced. People are saying that The Amazon is the lungs of the Earth. And you can’t call a singular rainforest a set of lu--doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.
But that’s not entirely true. Like the Gungans and the people of Naboo--why VanVelding--our world exists in a complimentary relationship.
Plants are like the people of Naboo. Conscientious. Helpful. A little complacent. And running on an improbably large power source. For plants it’s the sun. For the people of Naboo, it’s that giant fuckoff reactor with the timed force fields and what we can only call the “Darth Maul Hole.” For the purposes of this analogy, the people of Naboo can turn atmospheric CO2 into carbon biomass and oxygen in the presence of giant fuckoff reactors.
So animals are like Gungans. Just garbage. Utterly dependant on their counterparts. Fucking the whole thing up. Poor grasp of geology. Turning oxygen into CO2, and biomass into shit. Let’s call the oxygen “Padme decoys,” call CO2 “Jar-Jar nonsense,” biomass “the potential of this franchise” and let’s keep shit “shit,” except it also includes dead leaves, Darth Maul’s decaying legs, and a man who would have done Senator Amidala right. *sassy snaps*
In fact, part of this cycle is that all of the shit and decaying stuff is eventually processed back into CO2 waste products to complete the cycle. Imagine a line of Jar-Jars, each with their little ducky faces buried bill deep in--actually, don’t imagine the gungan centipede.
Also, I’m using “plants” as an inaccurate catchall for photosynthesizing organisms and “animals” as an inaccurate catchall for organisms that eat plants and other animals.
And surely, if you’re going to come at me for analogies, it won’t be that one.
So when people say oh hey The Amazon is the lungs of the planet it means that they're there their reverse lungs of the planet, but whatever. They take in all that Jar-Jar Nonsense and they give us pure, Padme decoys as a result. Great news for those of us who breathe Padme decoys.
And, of course, the Gungans turn the Padme Decoys back into Jar-Jar Nonsense. The good news is that, as with the Star Wars franchise, this back and forth has gone on in near equilibrium for millenia. I mean, that’s what it feels like anyway.
BUT some of the Star Wars shit--presumably The Christmas Special and Mauls Balls--get trapped in the soil or the Arctic Tundra and never get turned into Jar Jar Nonsense. So, that means that long term, we’ve got a lot of extra Padme Decoys floating around. Thousands of years worth of Padme Decoys so it doesn’t matter how many more Padme Decoys the people of Naboo are making.
Hell, much like Star Wars itself, if all the forests of earth stopped making Padme Decoys, we’d be set until all of us died.
The problem, in the environment as with the prequel trilogies, is all of the JarJar Nonsense. It fucks with the sunlight and keeps it from getting out of the planet. The temperature goes up, weather patterns change, the climate changes.
Yes, Jar-Jar, you cause two-y little bitty axadente, den banished.
So yes, we’re making fewer Padme decoys and that’s bad, but we’re also getting rid of less Jar-Jar Nonsense and we’re going to hit critical JAr-Jar Nonsense long before we run out of Padme Decoys.
Littering And...
So let’s talk about that. The REAL problem. The Amazon removes Jar-Jar Nonsense, but remember all the stored Star Wars shit I mentioned earlier? With Maul’s balls? When that shit is finally freed by deforestation and mixed with Padme decoys, gungans break it down into more Jar-Jar Nonsense.
Yeah, this all comes back to Jar-Jar Nonsense because Jar-Jar Nonsense is killing the planet as the comfortably habitable place we know it.
Something tells me an Old Republic/Galactic Empire analogy for pre and post climate -changed earths is probably going a bit too far so I’ll skip that.
That release of Jar Jar Nonsense from deforestation in the Amazon is bad, but it’s actually worse in other places. In the far north, freezing cycles prevent the breakdown of Star Wars shit and has for thousands of years. There are thousands of years worth of potential Jar-Jar Nonsense locked into Russian permafrost, and warming caused by Jar Jar Nonsense is actually releasing more Jar-Jar Nonsense.
Initially, Jar-Jar Nonsense released from thawed Star Wars shit wasn’t even in our Jar Jar Nonsense calculations. In a few years, its annual release will rival the annual release of Jar Jar Nonsense from China’s factories. And you know those guys are busily converting Star Wars shit into bootleg Jar Jar Nonsense.
Warming due to Jar-Jar Nonsense in the atmosphere also causes the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
Ice is white and actually reflects light back into space. As it melts, darker oceans that have replaced the ice absorb that energy instead, warming the planet more. That’s a loss of albedo.
I don’t want to say something like, “our planet is literally turning from the light side and the melting of glaciers reflects the destruction of the jedi order and the empire’s turn to the dark side.
But I’m saying it creates another feedback loop where climate change removes more mediating influences on climate change.
Deforestation, removing the Amazon to raise Gungans, also gives that area a lower albedo and it absorbs more heat. Plus you get all the Jar-Jar Nonsense the Gungans bring with them.
Since we’re on the Amazon Rainforest again, water. Water doesn’t really have an example in this analogy, so let’s call it water. When water falls on the people of Naboo in the Amazon Rainforest, they drink it, use it, excrete it, then pass it on to the next group of people.
It’s not gross! It’s nature!
Through this process, possibly called a Naboo peoples’ piss-chain, the rainforest transports water to adjacent areas which may not have a local source of water. Once you cut down enough of the rainforest, the piss-chain is broken, and only the Naboo people close to water sources can get water. The rest just dry up and die.
When you break the Naboo People’s Piss-Chain, it begins a real process that’s actually called “forest dieback” and we can agree that even though it means the rainforest is dying off without further human intervention, it’s a much better term.
Albeit, a drier one.
...Smokin the Reefer
And the thing is, this Jar-Jar Nonsense, this CO2, this Carbon Dioxide, it’s not just going to kill old folks from heat exhaustion and make parents who leave their kids in their car who would’ve realized it in the nick of time instead find little dead babies.
That stuff will happen and we as a society don’t collect data for and talk about those deaths on the nightly news because we haven’t thought about it. The same way we, personally, haven’t thought about how to survive in that hotter, Galactic Empire-Earth.
Higher temperatures kick insect metabolisms into high gear. They grow faster and eat more. That includes insects that feed on crops.
It feels condescending to mention the obvious falloff in crops from heat and lack of water. That’s the real flagship issue of, uh...the slow but inexorable Rise of Emperor Palpatine Driven Not Exclusively, but Principally and Critically by Human-Generated Jar-Jar Nonsense.
We’re just going to call it “climate change” for simplicity.
And that’s before Jar-Jar Nonsense literally starts making us stupider. When we started the industrial era, atmospheric concentrations of Jar-Jar Nonsense didn’t get above 300 parts per million. About five or six years ago, we hit 400. This year we hit 415 parts Jar-Jar Nonsense per million. You don’t have to do all the math on that, but human-elevated Jar-Jar Nonsense production--attributed, admittedly, almost entirely to George Lucas--jumped from a rise of less than one part per million a year to over two parts per million a year, and that's bad.
It’s getting worse. Don’t let The Force Awakens and Last of the Jedi fool you; the buildup of Jar-Jar Nonsense continues apace and our worst milestone tracks closely with production of The Force Awakens.
The Force Awakens isn’t code for anything like Trump entering the Republican primaries or anything. It’s literally the 2015 movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Getting back on track, at 1000 parts per million, human cognition drops by about 21%. I don’t know if that’s a sharp drop or a gradual one, but given that we’ve been god-awful, as a civilization, at dealing with this Jar-Jar Nonsense with our faculties ostensibly intact (except, I guess, for the generation that grew up breathing leaded air), I don’t think we have too much cognition to burn in solving this thing.
And that change in Jar Jar Nonsense concentrations affect plants as well. As levels rise, the iron and protein content of staple foods like wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans drop. Even if we can still grow enough food to feed the world’s population, they might still be malnourished and vulnerable to diseases.
You remember how we froze Maul’s Balls in the permafrost of Russia? Well it turns out that diseases nestle and wait well in the severed testicular sacs of Dathomirian males stored at sub-zero temperatures. Until they thaw. A thawed deer carcass as already given other deer anthrax who have in turn passed it a kid who died of it.
Even in temperate areas, brain-eating amoebas are spreading and killing Americans. That’s not from anything; it’s literal amoebas who get in your brain through your nose and your immune system makes your brain swell to fight them and then you die.
Scientists have made bread out of millennia old yeast. Microorganisms can survive for thousands of years and we have no idea what could come out as the northern thaws. Everything under the ice is Star Wars shit. And guys, some of it is worse than Jar-Jar Nonsense.
Lemme speed this up. When we talk about ice sheet and glacier melts, we’re talking hundreds. Of billions. Of tons. Of ice. That shifts weights on tectonic plates and causes earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis. I can’t get into it now, but the destruction of the human inhabitants of Doggerland, a Britain/Europe land bridge may have been a catastrophic result of the glacier-melt-induced Storegga Slides.
And ice sheets and glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic are melting four to six times faster than we expected.
Our oceans are warming about forty percent faster than we expected. That means that oceans are hotter. They take up more volume. Sea levels rise just a little bit more. And our oceans, which are to the entire world what the Amazon is to trees absolutely HOUSE Jar-Jar Nonsense, sucking up about 25% of all the Jar Jar Nonsense the world tanks on behalf of an ungrateful humanity.
But when it’s warm, it absorbs less. More feedback. Destruction of the jedi temple imperial march rise of Darth vader etc etc.
Our Conclusion
Look we should do everything in our power to push our politicians to adopt a Green New Deal or environmentally conscious policy that makes us want to hold other other nations accountable so that everyone drops their net Jar-Jar Nonsense emissions down to zero. Whether that’s planting more people of Naboo, or sealing tons of Star Wars shit in a vault, or just not burning unnecessary fuels that put Jar-Jar Nonsense into the air to own the libs...whatever.
I hope we can do these things, but we can also prepare.
I know the people who care about climate change are the first ones to curl their lips in disdain at the slightest survivalist sentiment.
So ignore the spiking food prices, the floods that might displace one in sixteen Americans, an infrequent but likely year where The Gulf Coast is hit with a barrage of Category 5 hurricanes like in 2005. Forget tsunamis that hit pacific coast cities while they’re trying to adjust to rising sea levels. Ignore the immuno- compromised refugees with ancient diseases stowed thoughtlessly by the government adjacent to the safe, inland area where you live.
Ignore a Federal Emergency Management budget that can’t cover the environmental crises we have NOW and the thought of US Marines trying to hold shipping lanes from the Suez to Panama Canals to secure food supplies and then finally, dramatically, failing.
You should always be preparing for disasters. You should have some food. A few days water. Some supplies. You should have an evacuation plan. For a day. For a week. For...if something happens to the building where you live.
Talk with other people you know who live in other areas. Make sure you can go there and they can come to you. And make sure that they're preparing so if they have to evacuate they don't come to you empty-handed.
There’s an episode of the Original Twilight Zone called “The Shelter.” It’s a good one. Doctor Who’s “Turn Left” is another solid story.
I'm not suggesting you build a bomb shelter but I'm suggesting that you prepare. And I know it's taboo because Americans hate acknowledging our vulnerability we hate looking like we're worried about something or like we're anxious about something, or looking like idiots because we prepared for a disaster that never came.
But I would ask for you to reconcile that with the certainty of climate change.
We are not stopping Palpatine from coming to power. He’s Supreme Chancellor. He’s running the place. He hasn’t dissolved The Senate yet, but you can damn well bet he will if we don’t stop him. And there’s no shame or hedging in finding a quiet spot out on the rim where you can be safe if we don’t.
[Whatever you do, don't sign off like you're making an Eddie Winter holotape]
Keep asking questions and keep learning.
---
Links
Must-Read
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Seven Case Studies in Carbon and Climate - An informative listacle that’s worth a few minutes of your time.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4768
Rolling Stone | This is How Human Extinction Could Play Out - An inspiration for this whole piece.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/
The Atlantic | The Amazon Is not Earth's Lungs
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/
Reuters | Amazon burning: Brazil reports highest forest fires since 2010
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-wildfires/amazon-burning-brazil-reports-record-forest-fires-idUSKCN1VA1UK
Vox | The Amazon rainforest’s worst-case scenario is uncomfortably near - This one is all about forest dieback and has no toilet humor.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/27/20833275/amazon-rainforest-fire-wildfire-dieback
The Washington Post | Why the Amazon Rainforest Is Burning - An okay article on carbon from the fire:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/21/amazonian-rainforest-is-ablaze-turning-day-into-night-brazils-capital-city/
The Atlantic | The Amazon Fire in Pictures:
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/08/photos-burning-amazon-rainforest/596815/
Nature.com | Soil Carbon Storage Mechanisms
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbon-storage-84223790/
BBC | Why the Arctic Is on Fire
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190822-why-is-the-arctic-on-fire
Gizmodo | Atmospheric CO2 Levels Just Hit a Scary New Milestone - This article puts PPM of CO2 in perspective.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/atmospheric-co2-levels-just-hit-a-scary-new-milestone-1834726038
Scientific American | Oceans Are Warming Faster Than Predicted
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-are-warming-faster-than-predicted/
Phys.org | Northwest Atlantic Ocean may get warmer, sooner
https://phys.org/news/2016-01-northwest-atlantic-ocean-warmer-sooner.html
National Geographic | Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/arctic-permafrost-is-thawing-it-could-speed-up-climate-change-feature/
National Geographic | Greenland’s ice is melting four times faster than thought—what it means
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/greeland-ice-melting-four-times-faster-than-thought-raising-sea-level/
Yale Environment 360 | Europe Is Warming Faster Than Even Climate Change Models Projected
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-is-warming-faster-than-even-climate-models-projected
National Geographic | Some animals can adapt to climate change--just not fast enough
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/many-animals-can-adapt-climate-change-just-not-fast-enough-/
Mother Jones | With the very bad take of: STahp ShaRin BaD piktUREs u guys, but then they tagged this as “Natural Disasters,” so I have no idea where their head is at.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/08/viral-photos-amazon-fire-fake-macron/
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