After reading and responding to last night's post on fossil fuel abundance, I had a few thoughts about the implications of our ever-increasing rate of consumption of fossil fuels. Clearly we are going to continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at a dizzying pace, and this will change the world. Climate Change is a scary thing to contemplate. Change is often dreaded, but climate change is the worst kind, similar to being told that your unhealthy habits are probably going to cause you some serious health problems down the road if you don't do something about it.
As with our health, some people get it and make the necessary changes early, thus avoiding a crisis, while others postpone until a serious complication arises in the form of a heart attack, lung cancer, or diabetes. Still, even then it is not always too late. There are plenty of examples of people who managed to recover from their diagnosis of lung cancer (thank you, modern medicine) or a heart attack to go on to lead healthy, productive lives.
Climate change is kind of like that, just writ large. There is an interesting dynamic at play, because many people simply do not believe that we puny humans could have such a dramatic effect on our world - it is so vast and we are so small! This is especially prevalent in the United States, with the idea often couched in theological terms, ranging from "God controls the weather" to "God wants us to use all of our resources, because that's careful stewardship." Yes, Rick Santorum is a moron, and he says moronic things, but he has an audience, and we're waiting for history to prove him (and them) wrong. The truth is that humanity has already drastically changed the face of the planet, beginning with the extinction of the mega fauna thousands of years ago, and we are having an ever increasing effect today. Increased CO2 production is warming our planet and acidifying the oceans, to say nothing of resource depletion. Our climate change problems haven't quite reached heart attack level yet, but the doctors are telling us that we're clogging up the system and placing ourselves at increasing risk for a crisis.
Just as any individual (in the first world, at least) has the power to change their health and circumstances, so do we as humanity have the power to alter the very nature of the world we live in. Climate change is scary, and it will probably cause a good deal of misery. However, it's important to remember that it also proves a very important concept - humanity in aggregate is far more powerful than we ever imagined. This idea needs to spread, on par with broad awareness of our destructive potential following the detonation of the atomic bombs in WWII. Just as we learned that we could no longer blithely launch ourselves into all-out war against other first world powers, we need to now learn that our economic actions in aggregate are far more powerful than any atomic bomb. Hopefully our first major crisis will come in the form of a minor heart attack, and it will be scary enough to wake up humanity without killing us off entirely.
"Always look on the bright side of life!"
