Day 26: All we can do is do all we can.

This evening I baked a cake for my son’s birthday celebration at his preschool tomorrow. In an attempt to be inclusive, I made it gluten, dairy, and egg-free. From the taste, this will work perfectly, because no-one will eat it, and so won’t have to worry about allergies.

Occasionally when I’m typing up a cute anecdote about my kids or writing about my art practice or my hope for the business or whatever I get struck by a very odd feeling and it’s happened again just now, when I happened to clock that it’s pouring with rain outside. This reminded me that the weather is a lot worse for most of the rest of the country (I live in a relatively sheltered bit of New Zealand, where the weather can best be described as “aggressively mediocre”) which reminded me, oh yes, climate change.

I find it absolutely surreal that we are just kind of watching the climate bomb go off. I am using the term “we” very loosely; most people would like to stop climate change, but are prevented from preventing it. But I’m not using the term “bomb” loosely. Climate change is heating the oceans, says the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, at a rate “equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years.” Skeptical Science has a running ticker you can embed on your website that has the total Hiroshima Bombsworth accumulated since 1998.

It’s 3.5 billion.

Nearly all the writing I do eventually trends around to this unbelievable, impossible folly. I cannot stop thinking about it. I wish I could; some people seem to manage just fine. Yes, there are causes for hope, no, I am not a “doomer,” but nor can I avoid noticing that each successive year sets a new greenhouse gas emission record (emissions must stop for warming to stop) and that right when the world desperately needs technology that works to mitigate the worst of climate change, tech leaders have started throwing trillions of dollars at energy-hungry “AI.”

It’s madness.

All I feel like I can do is write about it occasionally, like a pressure valve, and go on doing the things I know how to do to try and keep us afloat.

Man, it’s really coming down out there. I hope everyone is all right. I note that essentially none of New Zealand’s media mentioned the role of climate change in the massive storm hitting the country.

It’s a bit like talking about how terrible it is to have bullets flying around without mentioning the guns.

Or who’s firing them.

On a related note, that AI article I wrote should drop in a day or two.

Sorry for the depressing epistle. I’ll try to schedule some cheerfulness for tomorrow. Time to go upstairs and see if a new cake needs baking.