I want to soften my opinion and post something hopeful about climate change, meaning hopeful about people and governments DOING something effective.
But I can't think what to say.
I HOPE that the change becomes so severe so soon that even governments and voters realize they have to ACT before it's too late, assuming it isn't already too late. Too bad we didn't reach the point of willingness to take painful actions back in the 1980s - the pain could have been less, spread over a longer time, and more effective due to starting 300 BILLION TONS of CO2 ago.
But we didn't, unless you count some of the climate treaties that Republicans didn't want us to sign.
Maybe this is optimistic: whatever it takes to wake enough people up, WILL eventually happen. CO2 keeps climbing, it absorbs heat, period end of story. It will keep getting worse until the message can't be denied even by professional, paid climate deniers. And Republicans.
We've ignored subtle and obvious clues, ignored dire warnings, even ignored near-total scientific consensus. Like a mule ignoring urgings, threats, screams and beatings, I guess it is going to take a BIG 2x4 to the head to wake up a majority enough to do anything inconvenient.
While we keep pumping out 9 BILLION metric tons per year of CO2 that is not absorbed by plants, soil or water. Per year. That's digging the grave deeper VERY FAST.
Whether it takes cyclonic storms washing away our seaboard, or rising waters drowning them, more exceptional droughts and floods, the already-dropping crop yields trends, or massive crop failures so OBVIOUSLY due to changed climate that not even our current representatives can pretend to still disbelieve ... whatever it takes to make humans see the inconvenient obvious, it will eventually happen.
THEN we'll start acting.
But STARTING the corrective action after the damage is well and truly done may (almost certainly) be too late to avert even worse consequences.
Suppose it takes as long to cure the CO2 excess as it did to create it? Say, 50 to 150 years. Assume that we could, somehow, drop the global CO2 excess production linearly down to ZERO over 100 years, that would still add 450 BILLION more metric tons of CO2 over that same 100 years.
From the point at which we start acting like we're in a lifeboat with a hole in the bottom, things will continue getting worse for who-knows-how-long.
If we wait until there are a few crop failures, probably it will keep getting worse until there are MANY crop failures.
If we wait until seawater is ankle-deep on Wall Street, it will probably reach knee-deep before we change the atmosphere back to something sustainable. And then it will take longer for the excess CO2 to leach out of the air ... while things keep getting worse.
Lately it has seemed to me that humans are proving we are not a species capable of surviving our own abilities to pollute and despoil.
