It’s getting hotter and hotter

Likewise. It's a relief to have a place to be honest about reality and not bullied into falling in line with the wartime "keep calm & carry on" mentality like our only option is to stay hopeful, stay the course, and hope things get better... but this isn't a war, or, if it is, it is one we're not fighting and I find that infuriating. Ive stopped trying to change the minds of the people around me but they still bring it up as if they're trying to make some gesture of compromise. I wish we'd keep quiet about it, but if im presented with a future that's impossible and evil in its complicity, I cant just lap it up and say "maybe". This isn't some horrible thing that has another side, it's a fucking emergency that demands full and complete attention from us all. Anything less is an insult to all the species we've condemned to a drawn out and miserable death, especially in the world of the oceans which is where I feel most at home. It's not that our planet has oceans, it's that our ocean planet has a few islands where life grows only as thick as it can anchor to the ground. The oceans are entirely alive, or should be and were even in my memory as a child, and im not that old. From the surface to the sea floor, every molecule of water is bound to a biological process on at least one scale. If life were a spandex covering stretched over the ground, the ocean *is* life bounded only by its shores. It used to be like throwing myself into the embrace of some magical light, then diving through the mosaic of the endless carbon cycle, every drop of water home to millions of individual organisms; any potential gap in the web, filled to maximize the absorption of the sun. It *was* continuous but is now conspicuously vacuous. There are "cavities" of lifeless water, which people marvel at because purity is our highest sense of order. Im heading off to do my surveys for the year and im filling with dread, knowing that no matter how bad I think it's going to be, it will be worse. It has been every year since 2019. Every year I overhear people at the dive shop talking about their recent trips and the species they're ticking off their stupid little books, like some obscene stamp collection of the doomed. But every year those stories get me pumped up. Maybe it won't be so bad, right? Maybe the changing currents have brought back some of the life that used to wrap my body and cleanse my soul - I make no apologies for being a flake when I talk about the ocean; it is my first love, it *is* beauty, and it is dying... anyways, i get in expecting the worst and then am slapped in the face with an entirely new definition of "bad". It's fucking traumatic and that world has done NOTHING to us other than work to buffer our violence. The mosaic is now a desert. The water is dead. The reefs and kelp forests are Martian and the few creatures that remain look and act confused and hungry. I hear a lot of crap about how could record catches be coming in on fish like tuna and I have to bite my tongue "because the big ones that were too smart to go for your bait are so fucking hungry they strike ANYTHING!" We've robbed the ocean of its guile and left only despair. "What happened to our home?" But ill go and bear witness and sit by her side and cry with her as she fades into an empty pool. Ill watch boaters with their ballast or fake tits try to push back beached whales that have clearly had enough of starving. The humane thing would be to shoot them but that would require consciousness of what we'd done and enough contrition to fight our selfish urges to do whatever we can to save the one despite the thousands that never make it to the beach. It would take the acknowledgement that the entire beach scene, reveling on the edge of something beautiful with giant motors, plastic bottles, loud stupid music, and the occasional squeal of some moron finding the courage to wade in up to her twat before running out to lie on the sand or grab more drinks from the boat. Jet skis... fucking jet skis. So no, I will not play along with the fairy tale that something good could happen because something terrible already has. It's like watching a line of machine guns, wracking ammo, leveled at our heads, and then they play some hot hit of the summer and everyone jumps for joy out of the trenches to dance in no man's land with the silence of total preparation on the other side, while I stay in the trench and everyone I know and care about calls me up to play in the mud and stop being such downer. I bet there were people on the beach in that tsunami in 2003 who were begging their people to leave and find higher ground when the ocean disappeared, and this same vile optimism called them crazy for freaking out and told them to come look at the fish the ocean had left behind. I don't want to be the guy that shows them the whole truth and that's my cowardice but I know there's nothing to be gained from seeing it, not anymore, and I dont want their last good memory bookended by me pulling back the skin to show them the boneyard underneath and the certainty that the same fate already has us. Who wants to be the hype man for extinction? The worst part about it is it's not *something*, it's the absence of something where everything should be. There's nothing to grab onto and fight, nothing to steer away or even show off to anyone that didn't see what it was before. You can't fight the absence of life....and then you realize you're on a coast in one of the healthier parts of the ocean and that this is the *best* it gets. It's bad enough to find bubbles of non/anti-life, but to realize that the bubble is actually the living part; that we are inside a bubble that's contracting at the rate we release carbon from the deep past... it's horrifying. And somehow these idiots still get to decide what's real. How the fuck are the dumbest in charge of deciding what is happening? And im the crazy guy weeping on the shore with a story no one wants to hear and cannot believe.