If you inform yourself of climate changes, you clearly see the pattern compressing and worsening. Yes, it’s always changed, but never this steeply this fast, and never with such consequences.
It is not inevitable to collapse a stable system. That’s ridiculous opinion and assertions such as this stem from a blinkered, askance view of factual history.
The dinosaurs are extinct so some sneer at them. Call them unsuccessful. They existed for over a hundred million years. Some species still exist; sharks are older than trees, for example. We have not even been our current form of humanoid primate for a million years. Our species in other forms goes back only about six million years.
Saying “climate always changes” is the same as saying “all politicians are corrupt” or “there’s no difference between the GOP and the Democrats,” and so on. False equivalence. And wrong, no matter how many love to say it.
All Cretans are liars. Trust me, I’m a Cretan so I know.
Fact is not a matter of popularity, despite attempts to trump fact with popular prejudices.
Thinking for an instant that what we are seeing now is “natural” and not man-induced is willful blindness to mountains of fact countered by nothing but asserted self-serving corporate lies. They want opinion and outright falsehood to replace fact so they can continue with their rapacious crimes, their nihilistic despoiling of our ecosystem.
Corporate denies it’s a human agency causing anything between breathless denials that anything is happening at all.
Climatologists and meteorologists asked themselves whether it could be man doing this. Over the course of the last 40+ years they studied data on hand, they gathered more, and they assessed it all. Universal conclusion: Yes, man was the cause for the severe worsening of weather and the underlying climate we’re seeing.
They then asked, What can be done to preserve the ecosystem we require to exist? Starting in the 1960s, we had the Ecology Movement, instituting various world views and actions aimed at curbing the damage and maybe reversing it in some places. LBJ instituted the Keep America Beautiful media campaign.
Earth Day in 1970 involved school children across the country and throughout the world. It addressed litter, trash, the visible solid pollutants along our roads, in our towns, in our wild areas. It was intended to make a point that yes, each of us can pitch in, and each of us can make a difference, especially when we work together. It was also designed to give people immediate positive feedback. It was a success, and its effects linger today: I recently drove 3600 miles across the US and saw virtually no litter or trash anywhere. Clean place, America.
Clean, in terms of litter.
Meanwhile we have denuded forests, we have hurled carbon into the atmosphere at several tons per person per day, we have created fracking, we have dumped raw sewage and garbage from huge cities into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. We have affected the oceans, too, creating continent-sized dead spots with no oxygen or life, and garbage continents in the gyre of each ocean, spinning plastic disasters, toxic terra nova. We have also upped the “acceptable” background radiation levels over and over, due to leaking and venting nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons “testing”. We have found dioxins, rads, and heavy metals in fish, which are largely gone now from our oceans. We have had to abandon entire communities due to pollution. We have ignored mutations and cancer clusters surrounding toxic waste sites. It goes on and on in a deadening parade of horrors, an atrocity exhibition none of us will survive.
Now here comes China, hell bent on doing it all over again, worse. Even were USA instantly to turn green and renewable, the rest of the world would not, and the rapidly-encroaching death by heat and asphyxia, by poison and dehydration, by starvation and hardship only increases its eager pace, nearing the pounce point.
It’s appalling what overpopulation has caused, too, feeding directly into worsening of the climate and our condition, due in turn to the ecosystem becoming increasingly over-burdened and unstable from what we’re doing to it, all of which becomes worse when more and more people every day need things like food, water, and energy. The system is straining, wobbling. It’s over-stressed and will fly apart like an American car red-lined, out of oil, and racing full speed toward a cliff. This looms soon.
Most climate scientists say it’s long-since too late, we’re past the tipping point, and we may have as few as 5 – 20 years left before the Earth is simply not inhabitable by the vast majority of us. Only a few greedy rich might eke out a few more years in their underground redoubts, and even that is but a marginal chance for them. They too will die miserable in conditions most would call, in their superstitious reference system, hell.
That is a crushing prospect, but to do nothing in the face of all this criminality that murders us each moment is despairing and suicidal, if not nihilistic. Certainly we owe it to ourselves to fight back every inch of the way toward the hell we’ve made, and to find ways to stop, reverse, perhaps redeem some of it. Doing nothing only guarantees failure.
Then there are the labels. People fear labels even as they embrace them. It is not that you are a right wing crazy if you’re confused by conflicting claims, not at all. Corporate, benefitting short-term from the greed, polluting, and destruction of ecosystem and environment, have been fogging the issues all along by asking such phony questions as, “hasn’t weather always changed?”, or “how can mere man affect such a huge Earth?”
They have also used statements such as, “the data is not yet in on whether smoking causes cancer” and “no direct link can be established between smoking and cancer” (both “true” cherry picked viewpoints, neither relevant to the facts, so it’s false equivalence)/
Yes, those are right wing obfuscations designed to allow corporate more time to do more harm for more profit, regardless of lives and environment needed to support them being lost. It is now or never that we must stop tolerating this, start ignoring corporate lies, and definitely, deliberately move past, incrementally, when, where, and how we can, this impasse of pettifogging doubt and tentative hesitation corporate has created.
Why not fight for a clean, sustainable world? What harm is there in that? Only to corporate profit, and what does that gain we the people? Only further slavery.
Action is necessary, not further blather and jabber.
What action? Voting for green candidtates, protesting corporate polluters, and boycotting all business that supports polluters and despoilers, while giving your own support to green energy and transportation systems, would be a good start. Drive a hybrid or electric car. Install solar panels and solar-heating tanks. Grow your own vegetables in a backyard garden. Eat locally-produced foods. Subscribe to local organic farmers so they can make a living and supply you with fresh, healthy foods. Conserve water. Plant trees and greenery. Sponsor roof-top and hanging gardens in cities. Covered green walkways provide shade, clean the air, and offer more beautiful conditions for people in cities. Bike paths let people get around in a healthy, non-polluting way.
Be aware, every day, of how each choice you make affects everything and everyone, and choose the greener, the more efficient, the cleaner. Demand our politicians and corporations do the same and force them, by our will and our custom, to change for the better. It may be too late to save ourselves, it may not, but it is high time to begin living a more civilized, sustainable, and comfortable life of healthy, green, clean choices. If go out we must, why not in style?
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“There is only Will amidst the Random.”
/ Bu-Xan Da, Tenshin Monastery, Abbatia Mystica
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