Doom and gloom or an urgent wake-up call on human-caused climate change in Daydreaming on the Porch

July 4, 2021, 12:11 p.m.
|
Public

This entry is a continuation and expansion of thoughts presented in my previous essay. What triggered all this was the recent astronomically high, record-shattering temperatures in the West and Pacific Northwest. That heat wave caused by a “heat dome” unlike any that has been seen before, has caused untold misery, hardship and deaths in the Northwest, particularly where the majority of houses don’t have air conditioning as in Washington State and British Columbia.. My sister lives just north of Seattle where the city reached a high of 110 degrees. They took a brief trip across the Cascade Mountains where they have a cabin, near a small town which also reached 110 degrees. I was genuinely worried about them. It’s also in an area where wildfires are a real concern. They came home a day early.

All this bizarre and extreme weather and multiple photos of lakes and reservoirs in the West drying up from years of drought are a frightening wake-up call to jolt ourselves out of the delusory state of complacency that allows us to go about business as usual.

It’s true that in the past decade there’s been
encouraging progress with renewable energy becoming much cheaper and competitive with oil and gas; electric car breakthroughs; and a growing realization that agriculture with all its destructive practices and consequences can’t continue as it has for decades. As good as this news is it has to happen on a greatly accelerated pace, worldwide. That seems like a very hard goal to implement, but we have no choice.

Time is running out, and people are rolling the dice their children’s and grandchildren’s futures. What on earth kind of a world are they inheriting from us?

According to a recent article in Axios:

Americans still want multiple children, but they’re worried about child care costs, their own student debt and a pause in their careers.

What about whether their children will even survive the devastation wrought by human-caused catastrophic climate change that will start severely impacting them far sooner than scientists predicted. As recent news headlines reveal, it’s happening now. The question is, which parts of the country and the world will become uninhabitable first.

Fortunately, there are some scientists and activists who are sparing no limits on rhetoric and warning words to call for immediate action. Some like Roger Hallam, who is a founder of the Extinction Rebellion movement, think we are so far into the looming catastrophe that the only way to get governments to act immediately and urgently to curb carbon emissions is by mass peaceful protests and civil disobience.

The following interview with climate activists
Peter Carter and Hallam was searingly frank and honest, and the warnings of these individuals riveted me during the course of the 40 minute video. If millions of people would watch this, I truly believe there would be mass organization and protests. But I’m afraid many people won’t get past the first 5 or 10 minures of such dire truth-telling before turning away in denial, anger and accusations of extreme hyperbole. Surely things can’t be this bad. Well, they are, but as long as we pretend to play down the truth of what’s going on right now, the longer it will be before everyone wakes up to this new reality.

Some background on Peter Carter: He has served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s fifth climate change assessmentin 2014. He has also presented on climate change issues (especially the implications of global climate change on food security for the world’s most vulnerable regions and populations) at science and policy conferences in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

https://bit.ly/2V0rqvP

Roger Hallam is on the font lines as an activist:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Hallam_(activist)

Nore on the Extinction Rebellion:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

Roger Hallam: “Advice to young people as they face annihilation”