Good! They’ve slammed the barn door after the horse has returned. I hate to be Debbie Downer but it’s over. It’s far too late to avoid catastrophic climate changes, with all of their attendant horrors. Right now, no matter what we do going forward, it’s all over but the mass extinction , which is well underway right now. Great post as usual but it’s moot at this point.
Notice anything missing? While it got 92 recommends, it also got a large number of responses, most of them very angry at the missing content. That being of course that though it’s a fact that at this point catastrophic climate change is as inevitable as taxes, we need to double down on mitigation efforts and that means drastic lifestyle changes must occur and each and every one of us has the responsibility to ourselves and our posterity to do so. When I reread that comment, I thought that I should have added that but unfortunately Daily Kos doesn’t have an edit function and as I said I was on a break and otherwise occupied at the time so I left it as you see it, without posting a clarification attached to it.
Anyway, when I said that “it’s moot at this point” I didn’t mean that we should shrug our shoulders and go on being wasteful and awful to the planet and the biome. I meant that it’s too late for any baby steps by the traditional media toward finally acknowledging the seriousness and depth of the doodoo we have put ourselves in. As a bit of context for the vehemence and scorn evident in that comment, we were well into the second week of 100 plus degree temperatures here in south central Texas that day. It was still over 100℉ here while I was typing that comment. As it turned out, there was nothing I could do about the crap storm I began as, ERCOT being the most reliable (third world) power grid, I lost electricity for over seven hours on Thursday/Friday, so I’m posting this a little later than I wanted.
I tried a few individual clarification attempts with the responders who justifiably if erroneously thought that I was suggesting that we just give up but when Meteor Blades weighed in, my heart sank. I have so much respect for him and his intellect and compassion that I genuinely considered signing out and never coming back to Daily Kos again except as a lurker. I made a last feeble attempt at clarification but felt so horrible about his interpretation of my comment that I could no longer pretend that the people who reacted negatively were the ones who were in the wrong. As the commentator it was up to me to be more clear and not just assume that my long time concern about climate would convey the silent part. So to once more clarify my intent: when I say it is too late, I meant that it is too late for the Washington Post to make up for their decades of denial and ignoring the problem. It is too late for us to avoid some really ugly consequences of warming because they are all around us every day. I mention the mass extinction because yes, there is an extinction event happening right now, though it isn’t entirely climate related, It began with encroachment and loss of habitat and is related to climate change in that they are both anthropogenic in nature.
To sum up. We are going to have to sacrifice as a culture and as individuals to mitigate the affects that we have wrought through our civilization’s waste heat, though it’s too late to do anything but mitigate those affects and it’s far too late for WaPo to pretend that they are going to do responsible journalism in this regard. I did not mean that we should throw up our hands and say that we might as well quit. Though I hold to the belief that nothing I can say will justify the deniers’ ongoing gleeful contempt for reality, I should have made clear that our efforts are not vain, just that we have waved bye-bye to preventing climate change long ago. I’m very sorry.