Amerika

We, the People, are about to exterminate multiple ecosystems on our planet and kill all things within them. In addition, we are about to raise our planet’s temperature and cause other grisly effects. So say many but not all of our best scientists.

Yet nothing is happening. I mean, besides buying fluorescent light bulbs. Why? Do people not care? Do people want to do evil? Are we really this bad?

Think it through:

To act, we have to act together. If just some of us act, the others will take advantage of that and make themselves more powerful at the expense of those. This means that we have to force all of us together to do the same things.

Even more, we’re divided by inequality, despite two thousand years of trying to eradicate it. Third world nations want the first world to take the brunt of this issue. First world nations point out that they have infrastructure obligations and aren’t going to back down from civilization so others can get ahead.

Finally, we have to all somewhat agree on the issue, and we don’t. Some scientists say that global warming is real, yet we can all recognize the kind of cliques that can form when an idea is trendy.

Many of us distrust the media and government, including people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who always pander to the crowd, doing exactly what is popular but not necessarily what’s best in the long term.

Did that last sentence offend you? I was just about to mention how politically divided we are, forming our identities from politics and uncritically believed one side or the other.

We just can’t get consensus on how we should act about global warming as a result of these factors.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped.

The study examines the consequences of allowing CO2 to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak. The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

NOAA

(My take on the above article: we’re about to run into expensive petroleum, which is a good thing. In fact, it would be best if some nation like the USA took over a major part of the supply and hoarded it for military purposes. That would fix our global warming dilemma by not letting us get over the threshold identified in the article.)

Therefore, my prediction:

Humanity will take no effective action against environmental change, climate change, or ecocide. And we’d all rather be right, by our own political identities, than fix the problem — at least we all go down together, equally.