(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Welcome to a New World -- Strike for the Planet week 138 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-21 You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference! This is the letter for week 138 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile… STRIKE FOR THE PLANET Everyone should be able to travel to another planet… and we already have! This week: Welcome to a New World What new world? In case you haven’t noticed, we aren’t on Earth anymore. Earth was predictable. Earth had consistent seasons. Earth had a dependable climate. Earth had a thriving and diverse biosphere. The planet we’re now on has none of these things. It’s a new planet or, as the priest on the Titanic said, our former world has passed away. So where are we now? It’s time we get to know this new world What is life like on this new planet we’ve moved to? Let’s take a look at its seasons, predictability, climate and biosphere. Seasons — “Season” on old Earth meant a division of the year based on hours of sunlight and heat, plus the ecological and agricultural cycles of a region. “Season” on this new planet, in addition to hours of sunlight and heat, indicates the likelihood of catastrophic disasters such as fires, tornados, floods, hurricanes, cryosphere melt, disease, etc. You can divide this planet’s year into spring, summer, fall, and winter but doing so isn’t useful as the seasons on this planet aren’t stable; the “traditional” seasons, except summer, are getting shorter1, while the disaster seasons are evolving into year round events. Predictability — Conditions on our old planet were predictable due to scientific understanding of the mechanisms at play. Conditions on this new planet are so extreme that we are at the limits of both our data and our ability to make accurate predictions. As a result, we consistently underestimate severity, timelines, spread, and impacts of both our current actions and of events already occurring, and this underestimation leads to ever increasing fatalities and destruction.2 Climate — On old Earth, the long-term average of weather plus variability that we call “climate” was dependable enough for migration, agriculture, pastoralism, gatherer/hunter groups, and urban ways of living. In contrast, on this new planet, the climate is unstable and rapidly changing. This climate’s rate of change is non-linear and disastrously prone to tipping points (aka sudden, enormous, permanent shifts). No way of living is protected, and all are endangered.3 Biosphere — This is the sum of living things and the connections among them on a planet. Old Earth had a rich, vibrant, extensive, deep biosphere with an enormous amount of interconnections and redundancies. This new planet’s biosphere is being fragmented, weakened, lessened, and destroyed at an ever-accelerating pace. The amount of living things as well as the variety of life are being rapidly reduced, weakening the ability of all life to survive.4 Can we live here? We’ve hit the iceberg, the unsinkable ship is sinking (the “too big to fail” is failing), and you’re not launching the lifeboats! Yes, we can survive. We may even make it to some future where we land on a stable planet, one that supports life. To get there, we’ve got to invest everything into the lifeboats. These are what they’ve always been: locally controlled green renewable energy; water conservation, bioswales, composting toilets, and blackwater recycling; bio-highways and a native urban forest; retreat from the coasts and aggressive planting of marshes, kelp, and bioberms; making SF as independent as possible in food, recycling, and industry, etc. You have 137 prior letters with the details. Dear Editor How do you travel to another planet if you don’t have a spaceship? Easy. You change the planet you’re on until it is no longer the earth where you were born. And this is what we have done. Unfortunately, we left a planet with a lush, abundant, and diverse ecosystem and landed on a denuded and deteriorating world that grows more dangerous all the time. How do we survive on this new world? We survive by paying attention to the basics. SF needs an independent, locally-controlled, green, renewable electricity grid. SF needs 100% blackwater recycling and massive water conservation programs. SF needs bio-highways and a native urban forest. SF needs to be as self-sufficient and locally sourced as if we were indeed planning to blast off for space. Because SF needs to be focused on our survival now. FOOTNOTES 1. Kasha Patel. “Every season except summer is getting shorter, a sign of trouble for people and the environment”. The Washington Post. 22 September 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/09/22/longer-northern-hemisphere-summer-climate/ . 2. Jake Johnson. “amid Tornado Devastation, Sunrise Says ‘Call It What It Is: a climate Disaster’”. Common Dreams. 13 December 2021. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/13/amid-tornado-devastation-sunrise-says-call-it-what-it-climate-disaster . 3. Joe Biden. “Biden: This is an existential threat to human existence as we know it”. CNN. 1 November 2021. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/11/01/biden-climate-change-cop26-speech-sot-vpx.cnn . 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