The great climate exchange has me sitting here in Vancouver right now, huffing the 2nd worse air (AQI index) on the planet currently, wondering how long this forest fire smoke will stick around for and, at this stage, it seems like a while… With LA Niña predicted to persist until early next year, and only a vague chance of an ENSO-nuetral period next year, I figure we could be dealing with this smoke for a while – given that rains of autumn are already crazy late, but on the other hand we’re set to have some crazy snow fall, which is fun but probably not good. This time last year I was riding around in thermals, constantly armed with a raincoat – this year its 25ºc, sunny and not a jacket in sight.
I shot these around around Hope, BC.
It’s okay though, well, not for most of us probably – I probably shouldn’t use us because I’m a privileged white dude and I fancy my chances of surviving a climate caused catastrophe are better than a large portion of the planet. Either way, even if the anthropocene ends, its okay. What are we gonna do? I doubt we can reverse the climate exchange, whereby we exchanged natural stability for creature comforts, but I’m sure we will survive – its the thing humans are best at.
I have zero doubt that I’ll experience an ice-age in my lifetime and that’s not a huge problem, we’ve experienced them many times before and we hadn’t even invented 900+ fill synthetic down puffers yet… crazy!!! But yeah, Im fine with it because we survive, and to survive an ice age we’re gonna need to get pretty creative when it comes to resource acquisition, especially food. With that I figure we’ll massively improve lab-based provisions tech (lab steak for eg), something that is critical to our future regardless of any climate scenario, just purely based on our seemingly insatiable population growth and soil degradation. Sure we can pump fertilizer but the runoff from that practice has crippled the ocean and was the catalyst that started the jellyfish invasion.
I’ve written about the jellyfish invasion a few times and its a real thing – there was even a bloom here in Vancouver last week for reported ‘unknown reasons’.. I can tell you the fkn reason: everything we do contributes to reducing the ocean’s hostility towards Jellyfish. We’re effectively wiping out their only predators, sharks and turtles, sharks because of shark fin soup and bycatch and the turtles are disappearing because they’re mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish. Furthermore, Jellies have unrivalled tolerance for a low-oxygen environment, in fact they’re one of the most tolerant of all the plankton. And unlike my ice-age prediction this is not a prediction, it’s already happening, especially in once-arctic waters. In South Korea they’re already actively protecting nuclear plants (jellyfish have plugged nuclear plant outflows, from which ~30% of SK’s power is generated) and seaports with a robot-army armed with scissors, they swim around snipping up jellies with scissors…. Just check out recent Google news if you’re intrigued about the invasion.
These ones are from my balcony – Vancouver BC.
pm2.5 @ 120µg/m³ -> about 28x higher than WHO’s recommended exposure.
