Code Red for Humanity in Daydreaming on the Porch

Headline this afternoon: Greece faces ‘disaster of unprecedented proportions’ as wildfires ravage the country

Code Red That’s the message that comes out of the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, the definitive scientific review of the catastrophic dangers human civilization and all other species of life on Earth face if we don’t drastically curtail greenhouse gas emissions and methane releases.

The headlines have been dire out of this long-anticipated report. They are, in fact, so mind-numbingly bad and so horrndous as not to seem real. Can this possibly be what our future lioks like? Like this summer only much worse?

The psychological tipping point for me has occurred cumulatively over the past six weeks. Pictures of the vast, slowly but inexorably emptying reservoirs in the western U.S. that supply drinking water to 40 million people and enable large-scale agriculture in California and elsewhere; an unprecdented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest; wildfires burning across northern California, and scenes of the Dixie Fire completely consuming an historic Gold Rush mountain town; nightmarish floods in western Europe, China and India; and large parts of Greece and southern turkey beset by the worst wildfires ever in those countries. But the final straw was news that the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents might stop flowing, causing unknown levels of catastrophic change in the world’s weather.

What have we done to this Earth, this precious blue planet of life? I’m normally an optimistic person, but this summer’s weather has been so extreme that it all seems surreal, like some never-ending disaster movie. Yet it’s only too real. How did we let his happen? I have a few ideas.

The air-fouling internal combustion engines that have propelled our cars and lives into the “American Dream” of suburbs and endless highways and growth, now more than ever seem barbaric, crude and corrupt as they have over many decades poisoned our air just as the world’s reliance on coal polluted our atmosphere. The health consequences of this now and in years to come are going to be dramatic.

When I see those huge 10-ton pickup trucks and their huge exhaust pipes and smug and clueless drivers doing a particularly good job of pumping the air full of noxious toxins, I cringe and recoil in disgust. Some people haven’t learned anything. And if we keep burning fossil furls at the current pace, all I can say is pity the coming generation or two that will have to survive in the devastated and despoiled world we have all created.

Vox examines the key points in the climate report:

https://www.vox.com/22613027/un-ipcc-climate-change-report-ar6-disaster

Last updated August 10, 2021