Climate Change Threatens Humankind in a New and Different Way
In response to yesterday’s post What Will It Take To Involve Americans In Global Climate Change? frequent commenter Arlene writes:
I stumbled onto the film “Cool It” a couple of nights ago. I understand the thesis, but in a way, the film makes it a bit easier to dismiss the subject matter by those who tend to view it in a superficial fashion….. I remain pessimistic regarding our country taking meaningful actionable steps. In one part of the film they even mentioned the moral hazard of speaking to solutions such as geoengineering, given the typical reception being “see, there’s no problem”. We live in interesting times.
Yes, we live in interesting times, but I often wonder, “Who didn’t?” Even if by “interesting times” you mean the imminent destruction of the whole of human civilization, you wouldn’t want to count out the plague that happened along a few hundred years before modern medical science, or the nuclear stand-off of the early 1960s.
My concern about our current situation is the nature of climate change as we understand it. A build-up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that we have no way to disperse will cause a loss of farmland and a rise of ocean levels that will last a very long time; it won’t be like “point disasters” – epidemics, earthquakes, etc. Yet the long-term nature of the problem is precisely what makes it tough for some people to embrace.
We’re now witnessing something very like the “boiled frog syndrome” in action, and we’re collectively the unwitting frog.
For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it refers to the story of the frog that immediately leaps out and survives when dropped into boiling water – as opposed to the frog dropped in tepid water that’s then slowly brought to a boil, and the unwitting frog’s panic response only kicks in when it’s already too exhausted to escape.
The challenge for us is that we’ve only got the one pot (there’s no leaping out), and were witlessly turning up the gas.