It’s a mystery why? Reports of the threats from a warming planet have been coming fast and furiously. The latest: a startling analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting terrible food shortages, wildfires and a massive die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040, unless governments take strong action. The case of California wild fire, where will we hide?
Take a look at our country right now. It is an uphill task to predict the weather of the following day. Today rains tomorrow its so hot. What about the cold weather that hit the country this year? Tell me you don’t read something from the unwavering trend?
As much as 37 percent of the world’s population becomes exposed to extreme heat waves, with an estimated 411 million people subject to severe urban drought and 80 million people to flooding from rising sea levels.
The worst-case scenarios are so dire that a type of climate coverage has emerged that tends toward the apocalyptic. This year, William T. Vollmann published a two-volume work, “Carbon Ideologies,” that he purported to write for inhabitants of a calamitous and wretched future.
James Hansen, the scientist who warned of climate change in landmark congressional testimony 30 years ago, the apocalyptic talk gets old.
“I find the people who think we are doomed to be very tiring and unhelpful,” he said. The most catastrophic outcomes can be avoided “if we are smart, and I think we are capable of being smart.”
Marvel agreed. “It’s worth pointing out there is no scientific support for inevitable doom,” she said.
“Climate change is not pass-fail,” she added. “There is a real continuum of futures, a continuum of possibilities.”
So yes, things will be bad. And yes, we need to do more, so much more, to head off what could come. But how awful things get, and for how many people, depends on what we do.
And although humans famously avoid acting on long-term problems, the species does possess a capacity for looking ahead. There is nobody that is not going to be touched by climate change in some way.
We all need to take a stand and act.