A paraphrase from The Lion in Winter (about Henry II, his wife and sons relationships) "When the fall is all you have left, how you fall matters!"
In the end, I will die, my family will die and eventually folks will forget I ever lived. We do what we do for more immediate reasons and, sometimes, just because we think it's right and we won't like what we see in the mirror if we don't act as we think we should.
I have a geology degree. The world has been through way more extreme situations than we are currently facing and things just kind of chug along. Some groups have a harder time, some groups have a better time. Some places become uninhabitable, others become more habitable. I think most of this is hype. You can't
sell news or move whatever your agenda is with headlines like "Everythings fine, people are doing ok!" To really get people to do what you want, you need to create great concern or even panic.
Yes, the polar regions are warming. The tropics don't seem to warming much at all. There is quite a bit of evidence that it has been warmer within the last 8,000 years. (Evidence in mostly
local, because our models are flawed and we keep finding out what we don't know or didn't take into account. (Did you know that the time when the most land in the British Isles was under the plow appears to have been in the bronze age, then it got cold). If all of the ice melted and sea levels
rose, major cities would either be abandoned or we'ld emulate the dutch as long as we could. If ' your world ' is New Orleans or Manhatten the that would be the end. If you include Kansas, Siberia, central Africa etc. things might be ok or even improved (shallow seas extending inland might bring more rainfall). We're finding cities (roman, greek, egyptian) underwater every year or even more often than that (usually due to earthquakes, so pretty quick). They've found neolithic villages on the bottom of the Black Sea. Tough for the locals when the water comes in. Some other guy a few miles inland wakes up and says, 'wow, I have beach front property'. Global warming, at it's worse would be a gradual rise of sea level (way better than a sudden drop from 10 feet above sea level to 30, or even 3 feet below sea level.
Historically, the killer has been mostly the climate getting suddenly colder rather than getting warmer (admittedly, the info is coming mostly from Europe, China and more recently, the US, other areas may be different). If the crops you are used to growing suddenly can't grow in your climate, that's bad. If it's a few degrees warmer, I can mostly still grow my accustomed plants (as long as I have water, which encroaching seas may help), maybe even add to more that my neighbors down south grew.
I think we have many threats to our environment that are more real and more pressing than global warming. I sometimes feel it is being put out there as a red herring to distract people from real, solvable problems. I see our current global society as a house of
cards, built higher and higher. Eventually we'll get just the right gust of wind (natural disaster, assassination, war) that will bring it tumbling down. There's an old country song with the line "somebody told us Wall Street fell, but we were so poor that we couldn't tell". The species will still survive (we're kind of like cockroaches), especially the traditional rural poor, and eventually we'll build again, hopefully better this time.
(sorry, I just realized I wandered way off topic)
If I knew everything was going to end in a couple of years, the only thing I think I would do differently is I would retire now, rather than keep going a few years more so my widow will be more comfortable when I eventually check out.
.png)
5
