“To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false.”

The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership, research has found.

Canada and Russia have the next biggest expansion plans, calculated based on how much carbon dioxide is likely to be produced from new developments, followed by Iran, China and Brazil. The United Arab Emirates, which is to host the annual UN climate summit this year, Cop28 in Dubai in November, is seventh on the list.

Fiona Harvey, Environment Editor, The Guardian, September 12, 2023

Damned² :

Damned if we do; damned even faster if we stop.

The thin wisps of condensation that trail jet airliners have a significant influence on the climate, according to scientists who studied U.S. skies during a rare interruption in national air traffic after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Richard Stenger for CNN, August 8, 2002

only the immediate cessation of industrial
civilization could’ve saved us – 50, 80 or more years ago, that is /

but now, we are dependent on industrial civilization for everything including the Catch-22 conundrum of the Aerosol Masking Effect aka “global dimming” //

the “aerosol masking effect” where pollutant aerosols emitted into Earth’s atmosphere by human industrial activity reflect the Sun’s heat and mitigate the rise in global average temperature and artificially “cool” the planet —

but here’s the rub: as we draw down industrial activity – with falsely fantastical greener energy alternatives and “cleaner” industrial operations, we lose that artificial benefit and global temperatures will rise even more and faster because of the opposite effects of global brightening or demasking (colloquially known as: The McPherson Paradox for Prof. Guy McPherson, guymcpherson.com) ///

if the World’s population begins to understand that the aerosol and particulate pollution from some of the worst industries and practices — those that also emit the greenhouse gases that cause global heating, fuel climate chaos and drive ecological destruction and collapse — is also simultaneously and artificially cooling the planet — keeping global temperatures lower than what they actually would be

— and that the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere last centuries or decades longer than the near instantaneous effects of aerosol demasking,

Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases (gases that undergo chemical reactions) like ozone and ozone-forming chemicals like nitrous oxides, are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives.

Alan Buis, “The Atmosphere: Getting a Handle on Carbon Dioxide”, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab

maybe then, they will realize — there is no time for hope — only hospice.