Climate Change: What It Is, What It Isn’t
This piece in The Economist puts humankind’s position vis-a-vis climate change into perspective. It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not the end of humanity either. It is destined to be, however, the cause of profound suffering for a huge portion of the world’s population, the extent of which very much depends on our reaction to it in terms of adaptation and mitigation.
The Earth’s climate is an incredibly large and complicated thing, and thus making material changes in it takes a great deal of time. This is the reason that efforts to stave off the ill-effects of global warming, if we are to make a commitment to go in that direction, need to begin in earnest, right now.
The technology to make this happen is very much within our grasp. All that’s required is the will.
Craig,
Writing earnest articles,( even those as well written as that of the Economist) deploring carbon induced climate change and possible effects, accompanied by a great deal of hand wringing and blame, is as uninspiring and impotent as joining a world wide march/strike by school kids.
Once all the celebrities and pop stars have flown home in their private jets to holiday on a tropical island beach, or like Obama and Gore to their palatial beach-side mansions, there remains the question of what to do. This is, what can be done which will rove both economic and effective.
That’s when the politics kicks in and the whole process becomes mired in an ideological battleground of self-interest.
The left see “climate change” as a mechanism or excuse to rally support for the old, flawed, socialist economic model and centralized power. The right are alarmed at any potential for disruption to current prosperity and dubious about the credibility of alarmist “scientific” claims.
With everyone yelling at each other whose fault it is, nothing useful occurs.
The Economist is quite right, the end of the world is not about to occur. No exciting apocalypse will eventuate.
In Australia, our own home grown alarmist-in-chief and UN celebrity climate scientist, claimed that the present sea level rise of less than 0.3 centimetre per year will increase to 5 metres in 10 years.
This great pundit, claimed that armed with this knowledge and UN assistance the Indonesian government has commenced evacuating the city of Jakarta to higher ground.
He followed this claim by demanding Australia accept responsibility for re-locating the entire 11,102 population of Tuvalu to Australia as the island chain would be under water by 2025.
When it was pointed out to the self-appointed oracle and UN pundit, that Tuvalu is actually growing in size by about 4% per year, he scoffed and repeated his assetion that the nearly 40 years study was “just” denier propaganda.
Like many alarmists, he refused to even discuss any challenge to his claim the city of Jakarta was being relocated. Since neither the City nor the Indonesian government have plans to relocate the capital of more than 34 million people, it’s difficult to understand where he could have gained such information. .
Nor are Jakarta’s subsidence problems related to climate change! The problem is caused by 35 million people living in a swamp using the local water table.
The government is not relocating the City due to sea-level rise, but exploring engineering solutions to the subsidence problem.
That, in a micro-example, is what paralyzes climate mitigation action.
Practical and useful solutions are buried beneath a plethora of hype, ideology, and radical alarmist agenda. Political opportunists abound, each demanding some new and equally impractical “model”
In the end, the general public have grown weary of all the hype and shrill cacophony. They’ve lost interest, placing their faith in the human ability to adapt.