23.~The Earth Becomes Less
Humanity’s Abuse
Climate change is different from any other phenomenon humanity has ever faced.
It is not one thing, but many things that keep changing. It is eposodic in space and time.
Its science is diffuse so one explanation does not go very far. Its ravages are often isolated and may destroy one place while others have perfect weather.
It is sometimes slow in its encroachment. Homes are moved a few hundred feet, and again a few hundred feet, and perhaps again, until finally the sea has its way.
Suffering, destruction and death may be colossal. Or new warmth may bring new pleasure.
The darkest danger, is that the end of one calamity is just a warning of worse calamities to come, until a town or city disappears or is burned to the ground. Or rain ceases and crops dry and crackle when picked. There is no water to quench thirst and heat is so intense it is deadly.
There is the explanation: ”greenhouse effect,” which by its name tells nothing. Then comes the critical decision time and the question of how to deal with an impossibility that absolutly must be met head on and very soon.As suffering and destruction became worse the suppliers of the harmless poison that is the bubbles in soda water, knowing precisely what they are doing, lie while they sell and sell and search for more fossl fuel. Few countries take the situation seriously enough. They have neither plans nor resources, and wealthy nations such as the US are under the large thumb of irrational politics.
As time goes on children face worse troubles and suffering and their own children still worse until the unknown future comes to pass. For the needed reduction of emissions is likely to happen far too late and the atmosphere will be filled (and here we must guess) with 600, 700, 800 ppm carbon dioxide plus methane from the Artic. So far into the future, beyond the end of the century, the atmosphere continues to warm and the nuclear power and negative emissions capabilities were not developed soon enough. No one was able to convince the public that nuclear was superior, and besides power, fresh water from the ocean was scarce. Sometimes the difference between two large numbers, the rational for negative emissions, needs capability with long lead times.
Descendents are mystified: ”why did they do this; why did they not care.”
And in the present scientists are the bewildered ones, for the task of stopping climate change seems improble or perhaps impossible*-* while the dream of returning to an earlier climate is beyond imagination.
Those with power and money are comfortable, while the scientists struggle to explain a mixture of phenomena never experienced before. The plague left recovery possible. A melted glacier does not. Shakespeare, I believe, would not be up to the task of capturing the despair. Perhaps the Greeks or philosophers with black holes in their thoughts could communicate to far future generations, should there be any.
And the irony of ironies, the one person we would expect to take charge, as Franklin and Winston once did, is a menace of exponential proportions hiding behind a trail of confusion.
Is there light? Yes there is. But we must lay a bit more groundwork first.
