Sweltering heat is blanketing much of the planet, and one unofficial analysis says the past seven days have been the hottest week on record, the latest grim milestone in a series of climate-change-driven extremes.
It's not just a few days of global heat. The icepacks are melting at record rates, the oceans are warming.
You were told this was going to happen. You've been warned for decades. More carbon dioxide has been dumped into the atmosphere since knowledge of the problem became generally available than had been since humans began burning coal to any great degree.
But did the primary users of fossil fuels do anything? Nope. They sat around with their thumbs in their mouths and their heads up their asses while the fossil fuel and auto industries shoveled out the same lies and obfuscations that the tobacco industry did about the dangers of smoking and the car industry did about tetraethyllead.
And nobody wanted to listen. Because the problems would happen in the future and what has the future done for us? It was more fun to watch the goings-on of stupid celebrities who really do nothing productive. We were more concerned about who was marrying whom and what kind of kids got to play what sports or what pro baller took a knee and other inane culture-war issues, instead of doing something about the building fire that threatened our only home.
So now the first chickens are coming home to roost. Over the next decades and beyond, there will be a lot more chickens. The plastic-filled seas will continue to rise. Weather will become more extreme. Areas of the globe that have been fertile cropland for generations will cease to be so. As the glaciers melt and disappear, potable water will become much harder to get, much more expensive, in places where a billion or more people live. There are already climate-fueled mass migrations. There will be wars over dwindling resources.
It's not as though people weren't warned. But we all refused to listen. We refused to act in meaningful ways. One city recyling its waste was good, but it didn't make a dent in it. Buying a Prius instead of a Challenger would be meaningless (unless tens of millions did).
Only now, it's not a problem for the future. It's a problem for us. We've heated up the Earth too fast and contaminated it in the process. If your family has babies on the way or very young children, you may want to apologize to them when they're old enough to understand.
Because things are going to get worse, and they're the ones who are going to in the thick of it.
10 comments:
Yep, I had a class on global warming in engineering school in the early 70s. But engineers don't make the business decisions. So we 50 years of business greed that has led us to this suicide. I made a decision in my 20s to never have children and I think it was pretty wise.
This was our fate as soon as we let W and his crew of oilmen take over back when we still had an outside chance at turning things around.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
When DC was covered in smoke from Canadian fires, made worse by climate change, the politicians were determined to prevent Biden from outlawing gas stoves. They were blanketed in poisons and want to make sure we can still pollute.
-the best politicians money can buy.
I'm a late comer to this, only been yelling at clouds since the nineties ...
With the heat will also come cold....
The added heat energy to the weather systems is what
makes things more extreme. When it gets cold it will
be colder and what hot it will be hotter. Weather like
cyclones and hurricanes will get more energy from the
warm seas and be nastier. Winter events like polar
vortexes will likely be similarly disturbed.
Same thoughts on no kids, a very long time ago.
Eck!
Songs of the Doomed?
"When the going gets weird,
the weird turn pro"
-HST
I found out then that writing is a kind of therapy. One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Doomed
The USA can meet every climate goal, and it won't make any difference.
Look at the worldwide polluters. Look at those trends.
Conservation is still a good idea. Using climate change isn't working.
Would it be fair to say, that you were achieving critical mass before I posted those models in a semi-irrelevant way?
EYup, blame it on someone else. That's all you white christian mutants do, refuse to accept responsibility for and the consequences thereof your actions. Blame it on someone else: God, the devil, Democrats, the properly tanned. "Nobody else is doing anything about it, that's good enough reason not to do anything about it." I'm not a Lucky Man, I don't get to just lay down and die
I am trying to conserve a world for my grandkids to grow up in
Don't particularly care about yours ...
“We can’t do it alone” is a shitty excuse. It’s an excuse of surrender monkeys. We may not be able to do it alone, but it won’t get done at all if we don’t get on with it.
American leadership still matters, like it or not.
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