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Is It Time To Just Kiss Our Planet Goodbye? [1]
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Date: 2023-07-29
“Because of our selfishness, we have failed in our responsibility to be guardians and stewards of Earth. We have polluted and despoiled it, endangering our very lives.” – Pope Francis
“Say what?” – Many “Christian” Republicans
Maybe it’s just time we were honest with ourselves.
Maybe we need to admit that all the scary scientific studies and news reports about what climate changes is doing – and will do – to our planet are nothing more than preaching to the choir in a church where too many of the pews are empty.
That there are just too many vested interests that stand to gain if we refuse to address this existential threat. That there have been too many lies told by the Right for enough Republican politicians to turn around and tell the truth about what we’re facing and the urgent need to do something about it. That there are just too many stupid people who don’t believe the science or just don’t care.
Is it time to just give up and figure that as conditions worsen in the coming years the cost of refusing to do something now will be the ensuing destruction, calamity, and ungodly amounts of money we’ll need to spend to mitigate the damage of hotter temperatures, more intense weather incidents, and rising sea waters?
Look at this way: The earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. We’ve had a good run.
But the facts are the facts. Just look at the news from this week.
The New York Times reported that July is on track to become Earth’s hottest month on record, according to the European Union climate monitor. And scientists say that hotter ones appear to be coming. Forecasters warn that the world has entered what “could be a multiyear period of exception warmth.”
“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization. “The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before.”
You can read the Times story here.
NPR reported that heat waves in the United States and Europe would be “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-caused climate change, according to a team of international researchers.
“Without climate change we wouldn’t see this at all or it would be so rare that it would basically be not happening,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, who helped lead the new research as part of a collaborative group called World Weather Attribution
El Nino, a natural weather pattern, is likely contributing to some of the heat, the researchers said, “but the burning of fossil fuels is the main reason the heatwaves are so severe.”
“It is not surprising that there’s a climate connection with the extreme heat that we’re seeing around the world right now,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central. “We know we’re adding more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere and we continue to add more of them through the burning of fossil fuels. And the more heat that we put into our atmosphere, it will translate into bigger heat events.”
“Dangerous climate change is here now,” said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who studies how climate change influences extreme weather. “I’ve been saying that for 10 years, so now my saying is ‘dangerous climate change is here now and if you don’t know that, you’re not paying attention.’”
You can read the NPR story here.
Meanwhile, the New York Times published a story titled, “Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century.”
The Times reported that the system of ocean currents that regulates the climate for a swath of the planet could collapse sooner than expected, according to a new analysis. A pair of researchers in Denmark said a sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by the end of the century.
This new study adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how human’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to reverse changes in environment, the Times said.
You can read the Times story here.
***
The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this piece is, of course, no. It’s not time to give up, as strong as the opposition is from the Republicans and their contributors from the fossil fuel industry. As hopeless as their very existence seems to make the effort.
And make no mistake about it, as long as the GOP has anything to say about it, we’ll never do anything about climate change. Hell, even their God squad is against us on this one.
More proof came this week when presidential hopeful/self-proclaimed man of God Mike Pence announced his economic plan, which includes getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency and killing various incentives aimed at curbing the impact of climate change, including tax credits for electric vehicles, subsidies for automakers to make electric batteries, and the residential clean energy credit.
Pence also says he wants to increase domestic energy, which is GOP code for more oil and natural gas production.
His plan includes other terrible ideas. You can read the CNN story here.
My generation (the Baby Boomers) has done a terrible job and has really screwed future generations in our refusal to address climate change and our growing national debt. Sadly, we saw the world from the perspective of short-term gains instead of long-term reality, if we saw it at all.
Looks like it will be up to the younger folks to do something about it and try to clean up our mess. That effort will have to be intense, massively, and unyielding.
And it’ll start at the ballot box.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writing on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Also, please check out my video blog: The 3:13 on Politics.
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