The Species That Knew Too Much - part 1
Hello. "The Species That Knew Too Much" is my 2019 concept album addressing various topics, the main one being that our species is in danger of extinction because of climate change and a confluence of other existential threats. Elites and political leaders are "fiddling while Rome burns", meaning they are neglecting their responsibilities to address this global emergency.
One of the underlying artistic premises for the album is to explore worst-case scenarios, e.g., asking questions like, "what if we can't get it together in time, and what if we do actually go extinct?" Another general idea is that all the old conflicts - around nationalism, religion, race, gender, identity etc - will obviously be rendered irrelevant if we go extinct as a species. At that point it won't matter how well you control migration, how high is your wall, how big is your button, or what colour flag you're waving.
Sometime in 2018 I became aware of Extinction Rebellion, who are taking action on the same issues I'm talking about on my album. I realised they are the most effective group out there, as they are engaged in massive, non-violent, civil disobedience to bring these issues to the forefront of public debate. I decided to donate part of the proceeds of my CD sales to them. Since then I've become more involved in the movement, including playing music at the "International Rebellion" protest event on April 15, 2019, in central London.
I'm not a climate scientist - I'm just a musician with an I.T. day job. I follow the news. I mostly read The Guardian and New York Times, but try to read stuff from across the political spectrum. If you've been paying attention to the news about climate change in the last few years, it is, frankly, terrifying.
In 2016, when I started working on my album, the Brexit vote happened and Donald Trump became the U.S. president. Even during campaigning, Trump was denying the science around climate change (see below). Instead of working to save us from its catastrophic effects, he champions the fossil fuel industry and perpetuates American (and therefore global) dependence on fossil fuel. While he talks about building border walls to solve his fake immigration crisis, the UK government has wasted three years arguing about Brexit, a massive distraction from what we should really be talking about.
Trump and Brexit represent exactly the wrong kind of leadership and set of priorities for this point in history - we're wasting precious time and it could lead to our doom. We need to effect a radical global transformation to end our dependence on fossil fuel if we want to address the problem of global warming and climate change and survive as a species. This will require a World War 2 style mobilisation to deal with it, and it's got to happen now. And we need ethical, competent people at the head of this mass mobilisation.
For the people who understand we're facing a global emergency, this blog post may be preaching to the choir. But others still don't quite seem to get what's happening, or don't want to know. So I am writing this post as a way of addressing questions like "do you really believe we could go extinct?", "is it really happening?", or "is it really all that bad?" etc.
As part of this album project, and trying to figure out how to explain it, I've been collecting links to articles about related topics since late 2018. So this page is meant to be a repository of these links, and it's a place I can send people who ask those types of questions.
Obviously it's all quite depressing - it's natural to feel grief that billions of humans and other species are at risk of dying from climate change, and that our world is headed for devastating catastrophe and environmental breakdown. But it will be infinitely more depressing if we don't use this critical moment in history to do something about it, end the denial, and collectively act now to try to mitigate the worst effects of this emergency.
So the first step is talking about it. We need to get past these infantile and self-serving arguments from climate deniers about whether it's happening. The science shows that it is. The articles below were collected just randomly from general daily attention to the news for the last few months but lie on top of a wealth of scientific studies.
Now we need to face what's happening together, across national, ethnic, tribal and sectarian lines; we need to use our highly-evolved abilities to cooperate to solve these problems; and we need to apply intense pressure to political and corporate leaders, and the global elite, to overcome their differences and bring all their resources to bear - urgently.
Here are some links.
The Climate Emergency
- Cyclone Idai shows the deadly reality of climate change in Africa
- Landry Ninteretse - The Guardian - 2019-03-21
- Time to Panic
- David Wallace-Wells - The New York Times - 2019-02-16
- U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy
- Coral Davenport and Kendra Pierre-Louis - The New York Times - 2018-11-23
- Cars are killing us. Within 10 years, we must phase them out
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-03-07
- Heatwaves sweeping oceans ‘like wildfires’, scientists reveal
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- Climate change 'cause of most under-reported humanitarian crises'
- Arthur Neslen - The Guardian - 2019-02-21
- ‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change
- David Wallace-Wells - 2019-02-02
- The Earth is in a Death Spiral
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2018-11-14
- Like a Terror Movie - How climate change will cause more serious disasters
- John Schwartz - The New York Times - 2018-11-19
- Risk of domino effect of tipping points greater than thought
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers
- Dahr Jamail - The Guardian - 2019-01-08
- Greenland's ice melting faster than scientists previously thought
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-01-22
- A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-02-04
- Two-thirds of glacier ice in the Alps 'will melt by 2100'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-09
- Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2019-02-25
- UK experiences winter temperatures above 20C for first time
- Poppy Noor - The Guardian - 2019-02-25
- In Paradise, an Artist Draws Out ‘Beauty Among the Ashes’
- Jill Cowan - The New York Times - 2019-02-28
- 'We cannot swim, we cannot eat': Solomon Islands struggle with nation's worst oil spill
- Eddie Osifelo in Kavanga Bay and Lisa Martin - The Guardian - 2019-03-06
- Deadly air in our cities: the invisible killer
- Tim Smedley - The Observer - 2019-03-17
- Italy sees 57% drop in olive harvest as result of climate change, scientist says
- Arthur Neslen - The Guardian - 2019-03-05
- England could run short of water within 25 years
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-18
- Toxic air will shorten children's lives by 20 months, study reveals
- Fiona Harvey - The Guardian - 2019-04-03
- Why the Guardian is putting global CO2 levels in the weather forecast
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-05
- Vehicle pollution 'results in 4m child asthma cases a year'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-10
- Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready
- Noah Gallagher Shannon - The New York Times - 2019-04-10
Extinction
- Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-11-06
- Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-02-10
- Ice will return but extinctions can't be reversed. We must act now
- Mark Urban - The Guardian - 2017-12-28
- Would human extinction be a tragedy?
- Todd May - The New York Times - 2018-12-17
Climate change denial
- Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies, says report
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-03-22
- US official reveals Atlantic drilling plan while hailing Trump’s ability to distract public
- Jimmy Tobias - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Endangered species face 'disaster' under Trump administration
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-03-06
- With Climate Science on the March, an Isolated Trump Hunkers Down
- Coral Davenport - The New York Times - 2019-02-28
- Trump's war on science: how the US is putting politics above evidence
- Emily Holden - The Guardian - 2019-01-16
- Brazil's new foreign minister believes climate change is a Marxist plot
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-11-15
- Parliament must declare a climate emergency – not ignore it
- Caroline Lucas - The Guardian - 2019-03-24
- Despite What Trump Says, Climate Change Threatens Our National Security
- John R. Allen and David G. Victor - The New York Times - 2019-03-07
- Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You
- Paul Krugman - The New York Times - 2019-04-04
Counter-productive priorities - Another one of the main ideas of my album is that instead of addressing our existential threats, we carry on with the same old behaviours, e.g. making war, being nationalistic flag-wavers, engaging in anti-immigration and religious intolerance, men being violent toward women, etc - in short, fighting each other, and making money from it. This has got to stop if we want to survive.
- One-third of UK arms sales go to states on human rights watchlist, say analysts
- Karen McVeigh - The Guardian - 2018-12-21
- Global tensions holding back climate change fight, says WEF
- Larry Elliott - The Guardian - 2019-01-16
- 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
- John Naughton - The Guardian - 2019-01-20
- Why disaster capitalists are praying for a no-deal Brexit
- Geoge Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-02-07
- Someone is always trying to kill you
- Sonia Nazario - The New York Times - 2019-04-05
Plastic Pollution - I have a song called "Death by Plastic" on the album. It's a huge problem; I believe it's not as severe as climate change, but it's part of the general environmental catastrophe we're facing and affects us, the food chain, and the ecosystem in general.
- Plastic pollution discovered at deepest point in ocean
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- Great Pacific garbage patch $20m cleanup fails to collect plastic
- Hannah Summers - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- Founders of plastic waste alliance ‘investing billions in new plants’
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-01-21
- Coca-Cola admits it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Marine plastic pollution costs the world up to $2.5tn a year, researchers find
- Kate Hodal - The Guardian - 2019-04-04
Taking Action - We need to follow the example of the Extinction Rebellion movement and School Strikes 4 Climate Action, and engage in non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to the climate emergency. One of the most hopeful things I've seen lately is the work of Greta Thunberg and the children striking for climate action.
- Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel peace prize
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Youth climate strikers: 'We are going to change the fate of humanity'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-01
- Adults failed to take climate action. Meet the young activists stepping up
- Adrian Horton, Dream McClinton and Lauren Aratani - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- School pupils call for radical climate action in UK-wide strike
- Matthew Taylor, Sandra Laville, Amy Walker, Poppy Noor and Jon Henley - The Guardian - 2019-02-15
- The children skipping school aren't ruining the planet – you are
- Srećko Horvat - The Guardian - 2019-02-06
- My generation trashed the planet. So I salute the children striking back
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-02-15
- Teenage activist takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action to Davos
- Graeme Wearden in Davos and Damian Carrington - 2019-01-24
- BBC's London HQ put on lockdown over climate change protest
- Jim Waterson - The Guardian - 2018-12-21
- Extinction Rebellion activists throw 'blood' outside Downing Street
- Aamna Mohdin and Severin Carrell - The Guardian - 2019-03-09
- BirthStrikers: meet the women who refuse to have children until climate change ends
- Elle Hunt - The Guardian - 2019-03-12
- Stella McCartney leverages star power to save the rainforests
- Jess Cartner-Morley - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy
- Rebecca Solnit - The Guardian - 2019-03-19
Solutions - The "Green New Deal" idea is the closest thing I've seen to the type of radical transformation of our economy that needs to occur to even begin to deal with the problems we face. We are not helpless. We can radically transform our economy and our world, and we must do so urgently if we are to mitigate the worst effects of the impending catastrophe.
- A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish
- Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos - The Guardian - 2019-02-07
- 'Coal is on the way out': study finds fossil fuel now pricier than solar or wind
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-03-25
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-03
- Bavarian 'save the bees' success raises green hopes in Germany
- Kate Connolly - The Guardian - 2019-04-04
One of the underlying artistic premises for the album is to explore worst-case scenarios, e.g., asking questions like, "what if we can't get it together in time, and what if we do actually go extinct?" Another general idea is that all the old conflicts - around nationalism, religion, race, gender, identity etc - will obviously be rendered irrelevant if we go extinct as a species. At that point it won't matter how well you control migration, how high is your wall, how big is your button, or what colour flag you're waving.
Sometime in 2018 I became aware of Extinction Rebellion, who are taking action on the same issues I'm talking about on my album. I realised they are the most effective group out there, as they are engaged in massive, non-violent, civil disobedience to bring these issues to the forefront of public debate. I decided to donate part of the proceeds of my CD sales to them. Since then I've become more involved in the movement, including playing music at the "International Rebellion" protest event on April 15, 2019, in central London.
I'm not a climate scientist - I'm just a musician with an I.T. day job. I follow the news. I mostly read The Guardian and New York Times, but try to read stuff from across the political spectrum. If you've been paying attention to the news about climate change in the last few years, it is, frankly, terrifying.
In 2016, when I started working on my album, the Brexit vote happened and Donald Trump became the U.S. president. Even during campaigning, Trump was denying the science around climate change (see below). Instead of working to save us from its catastrophic effects, he champions the fossil fuel industry and perpetuates American (and therefore global) dependence on fossil fuel. While he talks about building border walls to solve his fake immigration crisis, the UK government has wasted three years arguing about Brexit, a massive distraction from what we should really be talking about.
Trump and Brexit represent exactly the wrong kind of leadership and set of priorities for this point in history - we're wasting precious time and it could lead to our doom. We need to effect a radical global transformation to end our dependence on fossil fuel if we want to address the problem of global warming and climate change and survive as a species. This will require a World War 2 style mobilisation to deal with it, and it's got to happen now. And we need ethical, competent people at the head of this mass mobilisation.
For the people who understand we're facing a global emergency, this blog post may be preaching to the choir. But others still don't quite seem to get what's happening, or don't want to know. So I am writing this post as a way of addressing questions like "do you really believe we could go extinct?", "is it really happening?", or "is it really all that bad?" etc.
As part of this album project, and trying to figure out how to explain it, I've been collecting links to articles about related topics since late 2018. So this page is meant to be a repository of these links, and it's a place I can send people who ask those types of questions.
Obviously it's all quite depressing - it's natural to feel grief that billions of humans and other species are at risk of dying from climate change, and that our world is headed for devastating catastrophe and environmental breakdown. But it will be infinitely more depressing if we don't use this critical moment in history to do something about it, end the denial, and collectively act now to try to mitigate the worst effects of this emergency.
So the first step is talking about it. We need to get past these infantile and self-serving arguments from climate deniers about whether it's happening. The science shows that it is. The articles below were collected just randomly from general daily attention to the news for the last few months but lie on top of a wealth of scientific studies.
Now we need to face what's happening together, across national, ethnic, tribal and sectarian lines; we need to use our highly-evolved abilities to cooperate to solve these problems; and we need to apply intense pressure to political and corporate leaders, and the global elite, to overcome their differences and bring all their resources to bear - urgently.
Here are some links.
The Climate Emergency
- Cyclone Idai shows the deadly reality of climate change in Africa
- Landry Ninteretse - The Guardian - 2019-03-21
- Time to Panic
- David Wallace-Wells - The New York Times - 2019-02-16
- U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy
- Coral Davenport and Kendra Pierre-Louis - The New York Times - 2018-11-23
- Cars are killing us. Within 10 years, we must phase them out
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-03-07
- Heatwaves sweeping oceans ‘like wildfires’, scientists reveal
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- Climate change 'cause of most under-reported humanitarian crises'
- Arthur Neslen - The Guardian - 2019-02-21
- ‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change
- David Wallace-Wells - 2019-02-02
- The Earth is in a Death Spiral
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2018-11-14
- Like a Terror Movie - How climate change will cause more serious disasters
- John Schwartz - The New York Times - 2018-11-19
- Risk of domino effect of tipping points greater than thought
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers
- Dahr Jamail - The Guardian - 2019-01-08
- Greenland's ice melting faster than scientists previously thought
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-01-22
- A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-02-04
- Two-thirds of glacier ice in the Alps 'will melt by 2100'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-09
- Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2019-02-25
- UK experiences winter temperatures above 20C for first time
- Poppy Noor - The Guardian - 2019-02-25
- In Paradise, an Artist Draws Out ‘Beauty Among the Ashes’
- Jill Cowan - The New York Times - 2019-02-28
- 'We cannot swim, we cannot eat': Solomon Islands struggle with nation's worst oil spill
- Eddie Osifelo in Kavanga Bay and Lisa Martin - The Guardian - 2019-03-06
- Deadly air in our cities: the invisible killer
- Tim Smedley - The Observer - 2019-03-17
- Italy sees 57% drop in olive harvest as result of climate change, scientist says
- Arthur Neslen - The Guardian - 2019-03-05
- England could run short of water within 25 years
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-18
- Toxic air will shorten children's lives by 20 months, study reveals
- Fiona Harvey - The Guardian - 2019-04-03
- Why the Guardian is putting global CO2 levels in the weather forecast
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-05
- Vehicle pollution 'results in 4m child asthma cases a year'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-10
- Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready
- Noah Gallagher Shannon - The New York Times - 2019-04-10
Extinction
- Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-11-06
- The killing of large species is pushing them towards extinction, study finds
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-02-06
- 'Almost certain extinction': 1,200 species under severe threat across world
- Lisa Cox - The Guardian - 2019-03-13
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-02-06
- 'Almost certain extinction': 1,200 species under severe threat across world
- Lisa Cox - The Guardian - 2019-03-13
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-02-10
- Ice will return but extinctions can't be reversed. We must act now
- Mark Urban - The Guardian - 2017-12-28
- Would human extinction be a tragedy?
- Todd May - The New York Times - 2018-12-17
Climate change denial
- Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies, says report
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-03-22
- US official reveals Atlantic drilling plan while hailing Trump’s ability to distract public
- Jimmy Tobias - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Endangered species face 'disaster' under Trump administration
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-03-06
- With Climate Science on the March, an Isolated Trump Hunkers Down
- Coral Davenport - The New York Times - 2019-02-28
- Trump's war on science: how the US is putting politics above evidence
- Emily Holden - The Guardian - 2019-01-16
- Brazil's new foreign minister believes climate change is a Marxist plot
- Jonathan Watts - The Guardian - 2018-11-15
- Parliament must declare a climate emergency – not ignore it
- Caroline Lucas - The Guardian - 2019-03-24
- Despite What Trump Says, Climate Change Threatens Our National Security
- John R. Allen and David G. Victor - The New York Times - 2019-03-07
- Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You
- Paul Krugman - The New York Times - 2019-04-04
Counter-productive priorities - Another one of the main ideas of my album is that instead of addressing our existential threats, we carry on with the same old behaviours, e.g. making war, being nationalistic flag-wavers, engaging in anti-immigration and religious intolerance, men being violent toward women, etc - in short, fighting each other, and making money from it. This has got to stop if we want to survive.
- One-third of UK arms sales go to states on human rights watchlist, say analysts
- Karen McVeigh - The Guardian - 2018-12-21
- Global tensions holding back climate change fight, says WEF
- Larry Elliott - The Guardian - 2019-01-16
- 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
- John Naughton - The Guardian - 2019-01-20
- Why disaster capitalists are praying for a no-deal Brexit
- Geoge Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-02-07
- Someone is always trying to kill you
- Sonia Nazario - The New York Times - 2019-04-05
Plastic Pollution - I have a song called "Death by Plastic" on the album. It's a huge problem; I believe it's not as severe as climate change, but it's part of the general environmental catastrophe we're facing and affects us, the food chain, and the ecosystem in general.
- Plastic pollution discovered at deepest point in ocean
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- Great Pacific garbage patch $20m cleanup fails to collect plastic
- Hannah Summers - The Guardian - 2018-12-20
- Founders of plastic waste alliance ‘investing billions in new plants’
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-01-21
- Coca-Cola admits it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year
- Sandra Laville - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Marine plastic pollution costs the world up to $2.5tn a year, researchers find
- Kate Hodal - The Guardian - 2019-04-04
Taking Action - We need to follow the example of the Extinction Rebellion movement and School Strikes 4 Climate Action, and engage in non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to the climate emergency. One of the most hopeful things I've seen lately is the work of Greta Thunberg and the children striking for climate action.
- Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel peace prize
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-14
- Youth climate strikers: 'We are going to change the fate of humanity'
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-03-01
- Adults failed to take climate action. Meet the young activists stepping up
- Adrian Horton, Dream McClinton and Lauren Aratani - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- School pupils call for radical climate action in UK-wide strike
- Matthew Taylor, Sandra Laville, Amy Walker, Poppy Noor and Jon Henley - The Guardian - 2019-02-15
- The children skipping school aren't ruining the planet – you are
- Srećko Horvat - The Guardian - 2019-02-06
- My generation trashed the planet. So I salute the children striking back
- George Monbiot - The Guardian - 2019-02-15
- Teenage activist takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action to Davos
- Graeme Wearden in Davos and Damian Carrington - 2019-01-24
- BBC's London HQ put on lockdown over climate change protest
- Jim Waterson - The Guardian - 2018-12-21
- Extinction Rebellion activists throw 'blood' outside Downing Street
- Aamna Mohdin and Severin Carrell - The Guardian - 2019-03-09
- BirthStrikers: meet the women who refuse to have children until climate change ends
- Elle Hunt - The Guardian - 2019-03-12
- Stella McCartney leverages star power to save the rainforests
- Jess Cartner-Morley - The Guardian - 2019-03-04
- Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy
- Rebecca Solnit - The Guardian - 2019-03-19
Solutions - The "Green New Deal" idea is the closest thing I've seen to the type of radical transformation of our economy that needs to occur to even begin to deal with the problems we face. We are not helpless. We can radically transform our economy and our world, and we must do so urgently if we are to mitigate the worst effects of the impending catastrophe.
- A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish
- Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos - The Guardian - 2019-02-07
- 'Coal is on the way out': study finds fossil fuel now pricier than solar or wind
- Oliver Milman - The Guardian - 2019-03-25
- Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
- Damian Carrington - The Guardian - 2019-04-03
- Bavarian 'save the bees' success raises green hopes in Germany
- Kate Connolly - The Guardian - 2019-04-04
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