Blind adherence is leading us toward the abyss

Our blind adherence to what exists stands between us and mitigating the effects of climate change.

It is not too difficult to see and
understand how our global
temperatures continue to rise.

A never-ending retinue of recipes aimed at resolving climate change or global warming, call it what you please, are paraded before us, but in nearly every instance those ideas are about maintaining life as it is, or at least as it is for the rich minority, and so ensuring the sustenance of ways of living that brought upon humanity the very troubles these schemes purport to resolve.

Emerging dilemmas have the potential to decimate humanity with climatologists illustrating, unquestionably, that the human-induced changes to earth’s atmosphere, and so the earth’s weather patterns, are so expansive and dramatic, that the near “goldilocks” conditions of the past 10,000 years of “not too hot, not too cold, but just right” are quickly ending.

Earth’s surface temperatures are nearly one degree above pre-industrial levels and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million (ppm) prior to the 18^th century to nearly 400 ppm today, breaking the nexus we have enjoyed for millennia between rather pleasant, predictable and understandable weather and something that is quite different and largely untenable for many species on earth, among them humans.

Circumstances arising from lifestyles rooted in a paradigm that depend upon endless growth and the continued combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, threaten us all and will only get worse before they get better for carbon dioxide, a natural by-product of that process is a long-lived chemical compound and so what is produced today will be with us for centuries to come. The maxim, “This too shall pass” doesn’t apply.

At a less than one degree increase in global temperatures we are witnessing some unexpected changes to the world’s weather, changes to which humans and associated infrastructure are not adapted, and yet a two degree increase is not simply predicted, rather unavoidable; changes that will bring with them what we, humans and many other species, will find not only challenging, but rather difficult to survive.

The science of climate change is quite complex, but even a layperson can understand it to see that what lies ahead will be, by brute insistence, quite different from what has been.

Proposals to avert the difficulty (we can no longer avoid it for we are 30 years too late) include high-risk and unproven geo-engineering ideas, including carbon dioxide sequestration, and significant alternative energy intervention (unlikely as the fossil fuel industry has massive political and social clout), but never have we truly explored dramatic changes to our way of living, substantially reducing energy use, changing our egoistic consumptive wants and switching our near obsessive interest from building bank balances to building resourceful and resilient neighbourhoods.