Freytag's Dénouement...

Topics: Climate Change, Ecology, Existentialism, Global Warming, Octavia Butler

Under Freytag's pyramid, the plot of a story consists of five parts: exposition (originally called introduction), rising action (rise), climax, falling action (return or fall), and dénouement/resolution/revelation/catastrophe. Dramatic structure - Wikipedia

Completely unplanned but apropos that this post appears on the superstitious "Friday the 13th," the reason for many Jason Voorhees movie serials in my youth. Also phonetically, it is akin to Fredo Corleone from The Godfather, insisting beyond all evidence to the contrary of intellectual acumen, heretofore demonstrably non-existent.

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The late William T. Kelley, who taught Trump at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” says Trump had “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” Source: Steve Chapman, Chicago Times

With their documented disdain of education, Karl Rovian "created realities" to include non-existent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction; anti-science as entrance to "the club" and the tribal (and corporate-manipulated), lock-step climate denialism, it was inevitable this ideology would eventually birth an orange, sacrilegious personification. Amanda Marcotte, author of Troll Nation succinctly ties the right's absence of logic and reason as raison d'etre for its very existence. Their grifter-in-chief's mullet - well past expiration - has become this generations latest troll doll model. This would be funny if they, and he didn't have power.

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Failure to meet the United Nations’ 2ºC warming limits will lead to sea level rise and dire global economic consequences, new research has warned.

Published today in Environmental Research Letters, a study led by the UK National Oceanographic Centre (NOC) found flooding from rising sea levels could cost $14 trillion worldwide annually by 2100 if the target of holding global temperatures below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels is missed.

The researchers also found that upper-middle income countries such as China would see the largest increase in flood costs, whereas the highest income countries would suffer the least, thanks to existing high levels of protection infrastructure.

Svetlana Jevrejeva, from the NOC, is the study’s lead author. She said: “More than 600 million people live in low-elevation coastal areas, less than 10 meters above sea level. In a warming climate, global sea level will rise due to the melting of land-based glaciers and ice sheets, and from the thermal expansion of ocean waters. So, sea level rise is one of the most damaging aspects of our warming climate.”

Sea level projections exist for emissions scenarios and socio-economic scenarios. However, there are no scenarios covering limiting warming below the 2°C and 1.5°C targets during the entire 21st century and beyond. [1]

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The ancillary effects of climate change are brain-eating amoeba in Florida and Louisianna. It is playing a role in tick migrations, especially in the south; particularly in the Carolinas, where I now live again. There's only so much OFF we can wear for mosquitoes along with sunscreen for UV. It goes well beyond snowballs in the well of the Senate by representatives well-compensated by the fossil fuel industry that are the pimps to his prostitution. World population in 2100 is estimated to go from its present 7.6 to 11.2 billion; that presumes the Senator's grandchildren will be a part of that population.

Octavia Butler's short Parable Series is worth your time away from thousands of television stations you'll never watch and news feeds on social media that are either questionable or manipulated by Russian troll farms to manipulate you:

The sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”

In her lifetime, Butler insisted that the Parable series was not intended as an augur. “This was not a book about prophecy,” she said, of “Talents,” in remarks she delivered at M.I.T. “This was a cautionary tale, although people have told me it was prophecy. All I have to say to that is: I certainly hope not.” [2]

We miss you, Octavia.

1. Rising sea levels could cost the world $14 trillion a year by 2100, Simon Davies, Physics World
2. Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again", Abby Aguirre, New Yorker