Today in Climate Links And Related

Well, it’s happened: I have a contract that I’m pretty excited about. That means that I’m not doing a big thoughtful thinky think piece today. Instead, in honor of one of my favorite online resources, I’m going to share some climate tabs I’ve had open.

I’ve listened to a couple people whose position on the climate crisis was that they were going to be dead by the time it hit, so nyeh nyeh nyeh young people, guess you should have been born in a less woke time. Well it’s starting to look like they may get to get to enjoy some of the wrath of Gaia along with the rest of us. The tipping point for a major oceanic current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (and yes, I did copy and paste that) could come as soon as 2025. If this happened, it would be like hitting a light switch. It’s basically the Earth’s heat pump. We’d notice right away. You know I think there was a movie about this like ten years ago!

I’m still in favor of throwing up a giant stink about our wildly irresponsible attitude toward planetary stewardship, but frankly it’s also time to start stocking in some provisions and learning how to turn willow bark into aspirin and training your leftist survivalist community. Margaret Killjoy is calmly assisting trans people through the stages of climate grief and into a resilient prepper mindset using that unlikeliest of climate readiness tools: the podcast. Just remember that 90 servings of prepared beans at $300 comes out to $3 per ladle while buying bulk bags of Goya’s dried negritos will net you a per-serving cost of about $0.22. Also, in an uncertain new world where refrigeration and IV fluids may not be universally available, maybe go with the product that won’t give you food poisoning six hours after you’ve opened it.

Thinking about climate apocalypse makes me think of this game I used to play which depends entirely on your ability to memorize all possible threats and think of all possible outcomes. I never won but man, I felt like a goddamn ninja if I lasted more than three levels. The key for me was always to rely on pets (you can have pets in this game) who helped me in battle, stole stuff from shopkeepers for me, and warned me of danger by running ahead and dying under the claws of a threat for which I was not prepared. Of course, all the other denizens of the dungeon were indispensable, too, not because this is an MMORPG, which it is not, but because they have their own highly detailed public and free wiki. I never played without the collective knowledge of the other five self-hating obsessives who played this miserable game open in a browser tab.

Between the pets and the nerds, the main lesson I took from Nethack is that it’s essentially impossible to go it alone. And no need to. We have our people, and together, maybe we can all survive for a few more levels.