Apocalypse When? Global Warming's Endless Scroll - The New York Times - 0 views
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the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it
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I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation
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Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”
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global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity
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it is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and “Humanity is not doomed.”
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Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.
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This creates its own perverse flavor of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly accept it, at least not enough to urgently act.
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This paralysis itself is almost too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about humankind — even the apocalyptic ones.
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This “end of the world” does not resemble the ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment culminates in dramatic final spectacles
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Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state, inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end.