Sorry, Washington, I know we're all very excited about what's going on in the political sphere, but what's happening in the environmental sphere is just too important to ignore the way we have been.
While this article may seem a bit alarmist, I'd hazard a small protest that it's better to expect the worst and be disappointed, rather than. . .well, you know.
Right now global warming is not only a reality, it is an imminent reality. At this point, we possibly cannot curb the climate change significantly enough to sustain life on our own planet. About two hundred and fifty million years ago, the same sort of global climate change happened, and well, I'll let the quote speak for itself.
The result of this runaway global warming was the greatest mass extinction since life emerged from the sea -- 95 percent of all species in existence died. That from an initial temperature rise only 0.2 degrees Celsius more than what the IPCC says could occur by the end of this century. We now know that human industry is causing in our lifetimes the same kind of methane release that triggered the Permian extinction.
Basically, everything on Earth that was frozen is now melting. And that's a big problem, because that will release even
more warming chemicals into the air, creating a positively reinforcing symbiotic relationship with our atmosphere.
The future is now, fellas. When I was in junior high, we were given a few paragraphs of reading on global warming, mostly centered on El Nino and how bad stuff COULD happen if the globe got too hot, but it would probably not happen till the time of our grandkids, so we had lots of time to fix it. Oops.
Preventing that outcome will, and should, override any other political and social issue. Quite literally, nothing else matters now. Every policy, every issue, must be viewed in terms of how it contributes to human survival. The impractical and the impossible are now imperative, whether we know it or not. We will have to eliminate carbon emissions. All of them. Post-carbon energy sources will be crucial to the eventual recovery of our climate, centuries or millennia from now.
Emphasis mine.
I'd like to see a revolution soon, but even that may be too little too late.
Come on, humans, we are the product of billions of years of evolution and meticulous prodding by Mother Nature to make something of ourselves, or at least clean our rooms. We can do better than this.