Climate Change May Be the Oligarchs' Ark

[Content Note: Colonialism; genocide; climate change.]

Jonathan Amos at the BBC: America Colonisation 'Cooled Earth's Climate'.

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.

That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK. The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation. This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.

...The team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492. It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery, and societal collapse.

It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

Unreal. It's absolutely staggering to contemplate the loss of life on so grand a scale that it literally changed the climate of the planet.

I would say that I hope the collection of sociopathic oligarchs currently ruling the planet don't get any ideas, except here is the text of a message I shared in a group chat last August:

I have thought about this a lot over the years, why it is that the extremely wealthy don't seem concerned about climate change coming for them (or their kids), and here's the thing: There are a lot of eugenics-obsessed narcissists among the extremely wealthy, most or all of whom are social Darwinists who clearly believe their best chance of long-term survival, and the survival of their descendents, is a much smaller human population with far less communicable disease and demand on limited resources.

The GOP, the party that serves these masters in the U.S., is a death cult at this point. They are actively facilitating large-scale mass death of vulnerable people.

(This is also why the global oligarchs curiously don't seem to care about the fact that there won't be anyone to buy their wares if we're all shit broke. What has become painfully clear to me is they have already moved beyond capitalism. Theoretically, if not practically. They have already envisioned the automated Utopia, but they have only envisioned it for themselves. They are now actively moving on to thinning out the herd.)

They've all calculated that their best odds of survival depends on the rest of us dying.

And if you think about it, you'll see that it's been in the works for decades. The extremely wealthy and influential who know what's up have made profound investments in vaccines and climate change. Think the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Gates, Al Gore. Their money goes to saving lives; to trying to prevent mass-scale deaths among vulnerable people.

I realize it sounds tinfoil-hatty, but I don't think it's, like, a secret society of lizard people orchestrating the end of humankind. To the contrary: This is deeply human shit. It's human self-interest and greed and survival taken to extremes enabled by the extreme concentration of wealth.

I don't even know that it's coordinated, necessarily, as much as an almost unprecedentedly elite group making unfathomably selfish decisions that look very much alike because their circumstances are so rarified.

On the political level, however, it's coordinated, because it has to be. Which is why I am able to feel so certain that this is what's happening, because I've been studying the GOP for so long and watching where the liberal elites are putting their resources.

And noticing the indifference to large-scale automation, which will put millions of people in America alone out of work in an economy where work with a livable wage is increasingly rare, as well as the indifference to climate change, which will displace countless people globally. This is a death march.

The way I see it is that all these sociopathic dipshits like Elon Musk have realized that moving to Mars isn't a realistic option. So they've decided to stage their own "Noah's Ark" event on Earth and wipe the planet clean to give themselves a fresh start on a "new" planet.

The flood is coming. And I'll be damned if I know how to build an ark for us.

I'm not a carpenter. I'm just the meteorologist.

That's a lot of words which basically boil down to this: People with the power to do something about climate change aren't. And I think the reason is because they have calculated letting it happen is the fastest route to the depopulation they see as the key to their own salvation, and they believe they have the resources to weather the (literal) storm, and they're making as many of us as vulnerable as possible in the meantime.

Humans have always been each other's worst enemy. Especially when they're trying to save themselves.

And right now, the humans with the most influence on the planet see the rest of us as a threat to their existence. That makes them an extremely pressing threat to us.