A long while ago me and my family of wide-shouldered liberal variants watched a play about climate change. We fanned out in the stalls and had ice cream in the interval. The script was hopeless after one major point, when a good amount of poise and cognition came together: A scene was drawn, of a room full of people ignoring the smoke coming in under the doors. At first, it is suggested, only a few notice and shouts of warning can be heard, but they are generally ignored and the hubbub of the party continues. Then comes more smoke, and the majority ignore it even as it swirls around their feet, because everyone else is acting normal. If everyone had responded immediately then everyone would have been saved, went the logic, but instead panic takes a while to creep over a populace, a while- long enough for the fire to become unstoppable. The comparison was made between that and climate change, a global room with nowhere to run too.
I say its easier to imagine a fish bowl than the whole world, and a fish bowl that has inside it a civilisation of intelligent bacteria who have developed technology that lets them look at pictures of cats by burning the one piece of wood in the bowl, running the risk of boiling themselves. Are they intelligent enough to develop a sense of global solidarity and go on to conquer the stars. That is the question we must ask ourselves!
But who wants to read another climate change article? Who wants to worry? There are also all those nukes, all those killer robots, that widening gap between the rich and poor, all those secret biochemical weapons, all that surveillance, all that liberty-taking, the terrorism beloved of the media and elite, all that pollution, the rise of drug-resistant diseases, neo-nazis, the Russians, the Chinese, outrageous population growth out-consuming supplies of resources like water and food, all that potential war, and so on. Feel better now? Better keep focused.
The ozone layer was only saved through swaying public opinion and getting a global agreement banning those particular nasty chemicals. Climate change is of course, a larger problem and a greater task. These chemicals don’t just work in our deodorants, they propel our trains, planes and automobiles, run our gas ovens and boilers, and, by proxy through power plants, our toasters, computers, fridges, lights and washing machines. To replace oil with renewables would take a major gear change.
Why is Obama setting up awards for brain research and space travel, not renewable energy and carbon harvesting methods? Why aren’t more power plants using carbon capture systems? Well because they cut efficiency by 30% and there is no bonus for them. But these systems will get more efficient if they are more developed. The immensity of our reliance on oil means it is harder to shake, and there is a greater urge to defend it and ignore the smoke surrounding us.
One argument maintains it is all lies and there is no consensus. We do have consensus on climate change in the scientific world. The last figure I heard was 97% of scientists agree there is human-made climate change. That’s as much as we have on things like gravity.
Another argument is that there has been climate change in the past, and this is natural. But if you look at the data the rise in C02 emissions and global temperature is much more sudden than anything in prehistory that we can discern from the contents of bubbles of air frozen in the polar ice that give us information about the past few tens of thousands of years. By all indications it is the greatest injection of the gas into the atmosphere since times of mass extinctions from huge volcanic eruption, and meteorite impact, neither of which you will note, has occurred recently.
Another argument is that the Earth will adapt. More CO2 means more gets taken in through photosynthesis in plants, which in turn release more O2. But have you noticed deforestation lately? The plants are not doing too well. You might look to algae in the ocean and hope it does all the work.
Another argument is that its a liberal conspiracy of scientists scare-mongering for more research funding. I sure hope so, you guys.
One of the hard questions is do you want to be just one of the people who did nothing? Trying to reign in our excesses is simply not enough. Waiting endlessly for Tesla to release a cheap consumer level model and have charging points at every petrol station in the country is a waiting game we should not be content to play. We need to enforce and reward change, from car engines to ovens to power plants. It is an unsettlingly biblical polemic the green party now wields, warning of hell and promising paradise if only you follow them, but it is a comfortable mechanism for a reason. There is a grain of truth in what they say. From the bottom up to the top down, we can make the changes. You might say it is a hopeless task since there are so many other countries not behaving either (whichever country you are reading this in). Ask, can’t they follow our lead? Can’t we set an example? Can’t we at least make it so we can look back and have nothing to be ashamed of in this regard, but that we didn’t act sooner?
Here a link to find if you don’t already know, your local MP and email them: https://www.writetothem.com/. If that’s not bias I don’t know what is.
Here a link to find if you don’t already know, your local MP and email them: https://www.writetothem.com/. If that’s not bias I don’t know what is.
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