Changing Climate.
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. - Iroquois Nation Maxim
Issue:
Since the 1870s humans have detected increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere and from the start traced this to the effects of human activities related primarily to the industrial revolution and our ever-increasing population. Over the ensuing decades our advances in measuring this trend has shown us that CO2 levels are rising at an exponential rate and have caused the climate to get warmer. The CO2 increase has been joined by increasing levels of methane, a result of increased livestock production and a secondary effect of atmospheric warming caused by the thawing of the arctic permafrost and the warming of the ocean floor.
Deception:
Our climate is changing rapidly and faster by the day; this is indisputable. The majority of the world's climate scientists attribute this change to climate warming, with its extent and pace caused primarily by human activity.
Yet other people - primarily in politics and business - maintain that human activity has little if any affect on the climate. They claim instead that the current changes are due primarily or wholly to natural climate cycles and that a warmer climate could actually be a good thing, a new world to which we and the innumerable other species with which we share our planet can readily adapt. These are deceptions.
Reality:
We have built the bomb and we have lit the fuse. The chain reaction of climate destruction cannot be reversed and is worse than we accept. It is not only the climate change nay-sayers who have it wrong. We are all in denial. Even those who have accepted the reality of climate change are largely unable to comprehend the true horror now unfolding on the stage of human civilization. Like a drama in which the protagonist's true intentions are perhaps suspect but not understood until the final curtain, the story of catastrophic climate change has been written and is now in portrayal - but its inevitable and tragic end is as yet unimaginable.
We know that carbon dioxide is a primary regulator of the planet's atmospheric temperature. We know, based on measurements including those of atmospheric carbon dioxide trapped in the planet's historic ice record, that the levels of carbon dioxide and methane have rapidly risen in just the last few decades to a point exceeding that of any time in the last three million to twenty million years. As well, we know that the primary generators of these levels is the human activity of burning fossil fuels (such as coal, oil and natural gas) and methane gas releases which are a secondary effect of the carbon dioxide increase.
What we do not seem to know is this: although the factors necessary for a climate holocaust have been cemented in place we do not yet see the full effects. The last time CO2 levels were this high the oceans were many meters higher. It has taken us more than a century to reach this point of CO2 saturation but it will take only years for our planet's climate to manifest the full extent of changes in accordance with this saturation. We sometimes assume that this is why some people and institutions, including Congress, business and the mainstream media continue to downplay the serious consequences of our actions and inhibit attempts to deal with either the causes or the results. Do not be fooled: their dangerous ignorance is willful.
The world has started down a path that will not turn back for thousands, if not millions, of years: destruction of the climate as humans have known it throughout our history. We are rushing headlong toward a climate tipping point at which the climate will change so dramatically - and will likely do so in the kind of time we can measure on our personal calendars - that we will no longer recognize our world as the one in which we have lived. Our lives will be so disrupted that we will feel a sense of armageddon. In reality, this is where we are already. Humans, like the fly awaiting the swatter, are just not capable of seeing this inevitability until the collapse is within our actual, physical eyesight. We ignore the mind's eye at our peril.
What can we expect? The collapse of the Gulf Stream, plunging northern Europe into a permanent Siberian climate in a matter of months. The collapse of massive continental ice sheets that will raise sea level by meters, virtually overnight. The desertification of massive landscapes with only the new coastal fringes of our continents spared to any extent. The loss of fresh water sources, agricultural lands and countless species of plants and animals. Massive population shifts that will lead to global famine, deprivation, disease, war and death.
Really, it is impossible to believe. Yes, it makes for a great dramatic story but a lousy end to human civilization.
Resolution:
There is no resolution in terms of prevention of drastic climate change - we are destined to suffer the devastating changes to human existence that we have wrought through our unbridled and continued use of fossil fuels. It is too late to stop the climate from collapsing on our world. The best we can do is minimize our contributions to climate change and learn how to best cope with the catastrophic changes we have already begun to experience and which continue to escalate.
Yet we have no chance of changing our own behavior when the United States Congress - and by extension, U.S. business and citizens, as well as those of other nations - refuse to take action to reverse our course. We can but we will not because we are just that selfish, stubborn and ill-informed. Even if we in the U.S. were to reverse course we have effectively taught the world that our western consumerist lifestyle, responsible in large part for climate change, is the ideal and must be emulated and replicated globally despite its cost. The world has learned from us well. It is called shutting the barn door after the cows have gotten out - we have unleashed upon the globe a cancer that will grow regardless of any mitigation we can conceive and implement.
We can and should stop the practices and behaviors that contribute to climate change. If we do this much we will possibly have some positive effect on the severity of climate change. The nations of the world effected just this type of essential change in the 1980s when confronted with the severe diminishment of the ozone layer. No such global cooperation is happening in regard to climate change, partly due to the refusal of the United States to participate in world treaties on the matter.
While we can and must start planning to cope with the change as best we know how so as to minimize human suffering and the extinction of species, both plant and animal, it is imperative that we we cease to tolerate and accept the blind ignorance of those who practice the deception that this climate change is only natural or acceptable.
Since the 1870s humans have detected increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere and from the start traced this to the effects of human activities related primarily to the industrial revolution and our ever-increasing population. Over the ensuing decades our advances in measuring this trend has shown us that CO2 levels are rising at an exponential rate and have caused the climate to get warmer. The CO2 increase has been joined by increasing levels of methane, a result of increased livestock production and a secondary effect of atmospheric warming caused by the thawing of the arctic permafrost and the warming of the ocean floor.
Deception:
Our climate is changing rapidly and faster by the day; this is indisputable. The majority of the world's climate scientists attribute this change to climate warming, with its extent and pace caused primarily by human activity.
Yet other people - primarily in politics and business - maintain that human activity has little if any affect on the climate. They claim instead that the current changes are due primarily or wholly to natural climate cycles and that a warmer climate could actually be a good thing, a new world to which we and the innumerable other species with which we share our planet can readily adapt. These are deceptions.
Reality:
We have built the bomb and we have lit the fuse. The chain reaction of climate destruction cannot be reversed and is worse than we accept. It is not only the climate change nay-sayers who have it wrong. We are all in denial. Even those who have accepted the reality of climate change are largely unable to comprehend the true horror now unfolding on the stage of human civilization. Like a drama in which the protagonist's true intentions are perhaps suspect but not understood until the final curtain, the story of catastrophic climate change has been written and is now in portrayal - but its inevitable and tragic end is as yet unimaginable.
We know that carbon dioxide is a primary regulator of the planet's atmospheric temperature. We know, based on measurements including those of atmospheric carbon dioxide trapped in the planet's historic ice record, that the levels of carbon dioxide and methane have rapidly risen in just the last few decades to a point exceeding that of any time in the last three million to twenty million years. As well, we know that the primary generators of these levels is the human activity of burning fossil fuels (such as coal, oil and natural gas) and methane gas releases which are a secondary effect of the carbon dioxide increase.
What we do not seem to know is this: although the factors necessary for a climate holocaust have been cemented in place we do not yet see the full effects. The last time CO2 levels were this high the oceans were many meters higher. It has taken us more than a century to reach this point of CO2 saturation but it will take only years for our planet's climate to manifest the full extent of changes in accordance with this saturation. We sometimes assume that this is why some people and institutions, including Congress, business and the mainstream media continue to downplay the serious consequences of our actions and inhibit attempts to deal with either the causes or the results. Do not be fooled: their dangerous ignorance is willful.
The world has started down a path that will not turn back for thousands, if not millions, of years: destruction of the climate as humans have known it throughout our history. We are rushing headlong toward a climate tipping point at which the climate will change so dramatically - and will likely do so in the kind of time we can measure on our personal calendars - that we will no longer recognize our world as the one in which we have lived. Our lives will be so disrupted that we will feel a sense of armageddon. In reality, this is where we are already. Humans, like the fly awaiting the swatter, are just not capable of seeing this inevitability until the collapse is within our actual, physical eyesight. We ignore the mind's eye at our peril.
What can we expect? The collapse of the Gulf Stream, plunging northern Europe into a permanent Siberian climate in a matter of months. The collapse of massive continental ice sheets that will raise sea level by meters, virtually overnight. The desertification of massive landscapes with only the new coastal fringes of our continents spared to any extent. The loss of fresh water sources, agricultural lands and countless species of plants and animals. Massive population shifts that will lead to global famine, deprivation, disease, war and death.
Really, it is impossible to believe. Yes, it makes for a great dramatic story but a lousy end to human civilization.
Resolution:
There is no resolution in terms of prevention of drastic climate change - we are destined to suffer the devastating changes to human existence that we have wrought through our unbridled and continued use of fossil fuels. It is too late to stop the climate from collapsing on our world. The best we can do is minimize our contributions to climate change and learn how to best cope with the catastrophic changes we have already begun to experience and which continue to escalate.
Yet we have no chance of changing our own behavior when the United States Congress - and by extension, U.S. business and citizens, as well as those of other nations - refuse to take action to reverse our course. We can but we will not because we are just that selfish, stubborn and ill-informed. Even if we in the U.S. were to reverse course we have effectively taught the world that our western consumerist lifestyle, responsible in large part for climate change, is the ideal and must be emulated and replicated globally despite its cost. The world has learned from us well. It is called shutting the barn door after the cows have gotten out - we have unleashed upon the globe a cancer that will grow regardless of any mitigation we can conceive and implement.
We can and should stop the practices and behaviors that contribute to climate change. If we do this much we will possibly have some positive effect on the severity of climate change. The nations of the world effected just this type of essential change in the 1980s when confronted with the severe diminishment of the ozone layer. No such global cooperation is happening in regard to climate change, partly due to the refusal of the United States to participate in world treaties on the matter.
While we can and must start planning to cope with the change as best we know how so as to minimize human suffering and the extinction of species, both plant and animal, it is imperative that we we cease to tolerate and accept the blind ignorance of those who practice the deception that this climate change is only natural or acceptable.