Looming Void: July 2, 2025
Clima
10,000 minutes
A chunk of the six weeks since my last Looming Void newsletter has been spent interstate or in the country, helping family with grandchildren. Those days were truly invigorating (as well as, frankly, exhausting). Spending time with kids should inspire all of us to strive for a better future. Instead, most of humanity seems determined to do its worst.
For example, a major U.S. newspaper used AI to generate a summer reading list. Only ten of the recommended fifteen books exist. Biographer Lance Richardson posted on BlueSky about this cesspit: “I was emailing with my book publicist this afternoon and mentioned the Chicago Sun Times debacle. The feeling in the industry is, to put it mildly, bleak. Books are magic tricks that conjure a whole world inside your head. How miraculous. Why we have to degrade them so thoroughly is beyond me.”
And then he follows up: “The race to destroy absolutely everything beautiful for the sake of a buck—from books to movies to forests to rivers—is so grotesque that it makes me not want to get up most mornings. The despair is real.”
The despair is genuine. I’m working well but right now, here in this work cafe today, all I feel is that despair.
But first, the work. I’m editing Chapter 13 (out of 15 chapters) for logic and flow. Once 13, 14, and 15 are done, I’ll edit chapter-by-chapter for plotline and language. Then I’ll edit the entire manuscript, including reading it aloud. I won’t bore you with the details because later I’ll be boring you with the details as I do it, but suffice to say, I’m heading to submit the manuscript to my copyeditor at the end of August (a month later than my earlier plan). I have contracted a cover designer (again, more on that later in the winter), am beginning to source three dozen photographs, am thinking about a map, and will start the process to find a great indexer. A marketing plan is needed. Two websites have to be upgraded (either by me or by paying a professional, I’m not sure of the best approach).
Now let’s deal with the flip side of “working well,” the despair.
Monsters
Cataloguing the regular “bad” climate news is easy, especially the horrors looming from Trump’s budget, but what’s the point? No doubt you’ve read most it somewhere else. But I can’t avoid dealing with the reality exposed by a new macro assessment.
The latest authoritative IPCC data is four years old. Sixty key scientists, many of them IPCC veterans, have now issued an update. The news is awful. As one expert puts it, “if you look at this year's update, things are all moving in the wrong direction.” We’re at +1.36C and are likely to breach that famous +1.5C benchmark in only a few years’ time. The seas are rising at four centimeters a decade. Expressed in dry scientific terms: “Surplus heat accumulating in the Earth's system at an accelerating rate is driving changes in every component of the climate system, including sea level rise, ocean warming, ice loss, continental warming and permafrost thawing.”
But reading that recent update as summarized by the scientist-authors themselves did not reveal the terrors contained therein. Ricky Lanusse eloquently damns us with the futures underlying this update but even that is eclipsed by our most eloquent, honest truthteller, Bill McKibben. In a newsletter entitled “So many moving pieces,” a long newsletter well worth reading slowly, he includes this lament:
Given the science above, I don’t think it’s climate alarmism that’s going to end up on the ash heap of history—I think it’s pretty clearly humanity, not to mention the rest of the planet’s biology.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather is another go-to. By nature rather cautious, he is often found tempering doomerism. But yesterday he addressed a June 26 NYT article by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Claire Brown, and Mira Rojanasakul (if you can reach behind the paywall, please do read “The world is warming up: And it’s happening faster”) and came out in favor of the growing scientific view that our planet is in deep trouble. Listen to the sadness behind his measured conclusion:
If we were solely relying on drawing trend lines through cherry-picked periods in surface temperature records, I too would be pretty skeptical about making strong claims regarding a recent acceleration in warming.
But we don’t just have surface temperatures:
Acceleration in surface temperatures is more readily apparent and significant when removing natural variability.
Our climate models expect a faster rate of warming under current policy scenarios.
We have a clear mechanism in declining aerosol emissions to explain a recent acceleration.
Acceleration is apparent in both ocean heat content and earth energy imbalance measurements.
In my view this consilience of evidence tips the scale toward pretty clear acceleration in recent years. I hope I am wrong – I’d prefer to live in a world where the rate of warming was flat or falling – but the evidence is becoming too strong to ignore.
I, for one, am not ignoring the evidence. When I read those perspectives, a searing surge of grief simply overwhelmed me. I sat in my cafe, holding my head. But then I recovered by walking down the road to get a haircut (you can see me in the mirror).
Of course, “recovered” does not mean recovered. It means I’m here and penning this newsletter. I still haven’t processed the bullet truth that our world is in much worse health than even pessimistic old me could envisage. What is the answer?
One minor-key response is to employ language, as Annabelle Lukin argues in her latest newsletter. Let’s lodge a phrase like “dirty energy” into every discussion of fossil fuels:
What I want to show you is that we very rarely hear the term ‘dirty energy’ or ‘fossil energy’. And this is what we have to bring out from the shadows. Planet-heating energy companies get this beautiful positive word ‘energy’ for free. We have to snatch it away from them, so that their energy becomes known as dirty and polluting - so theirs becomes the marked option. Right now, terms like ‘fossil energy’ and ‘dirty energy’ are so infrequent they are long way off the top 100. … It is not easy to effect this kind of change. But words change minds. The more we all say ‘dirty energy’, the more it will catch on and spread. It’s even more important to say it if you are someone will lots of reach on your forms of media. This is how we change the zeitgeist. It’s time to talk dirty.
A friend spotted this in Melbourne’s famed Hosiery Lane:
Mortality
Nestling beneath book-completion/production anxiety and climate change terror is the more fundamental rebellion against dying. I mean, we all understand we eventually die, but I’m especially resistant to the current zeitgeist of acceptance of that fact in everyday life. “Approach this phase of life with dignity” … when I hear that, I reach for the chainsaw.
So, at the risk of endless repetition, I’m still “struggling” with the complex subjects of mortality, health, diet, exercise, and (buzz word) healthfulness. I’m still eating healthily (if you disagree with me on what this means, fair enough) much of my days, yet snacking and dining out (if you disagree with me that dining out, while a boon, can never equate to “eating healthily,” fair enough) mean my weight has crept up and my “preventative” cardiologist has increased my statins dosage because I can’t get my LDL levels below 1.8 nmol/L. For a period I lowered my blood pressure to around 130/80 through largely banishing salt but now my cardiologist (bless him) has introduced low-dose hypertension tabs. Instead of exercising seven times a week (if you disagree with me on the need for this, fair enough), the early winter weeks have seen only 2-4 times/week. I do believe I’ve “mastered” sleep, that is, have corrected a lifelong tendency to short-change sleep, by being kind to the old body and spending 8.5 hours in bed for 7 hours of sleep (if you disagree one needs 7, fair enough).
I’m nearing the end of three years of this “struggle,” after a health scare, and one disappointing aspect has been that, in spite of copious research and monitoring and “effort,” what I don’t have is any sense of peace with this entire subject. You’d think a goal-oriented chappie like me would have, after three years, reached a new equilibrium of behaviours that leaves me satisfied I’m doing what I can to live fully and sensibly, but that’s not the case. The “struggle” continues (if you disagree that struggle is needed, fair enough).
The month of July will be first in a while without any travel, so I’m hoping to settle into something “better.” I’ve entered a 10-kilometer fun run in two weeks; hopefully that will impel me to restore mileage disciplines. I’ve resumed baking no-salt, no-oil, no-sugar, wholemeal flour bread. Once more I cook my own lentils, beans, and chickpeas. After re-upping alcohol from near abstinence to 0.5-1.5 glasses/day, I shove against that drug.
Oh, and I continue to fight against social media, indeed the daily news. Let’s make July a “slow days” month.