„It is, I promise, worse than you think.“
„If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.“
The Uninhabitable Earth - Life After Warming (2019) David Wallace Wells
„The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. [...]
In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster.“
"What does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to live?
What is truth? What is good?
In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality - What does my life mean in the face of death? - is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. [...]
What does consumer choice mean compared against 100,000 years of ecological catastrophe? What does one life mean in the face of mass death or thecollapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful decisions in the shadow of our inevitable end?"
Learning How To Die In The Anthropocene (2015) - Roy Scranton
