“You did it! You finally did it! Damn you all to hell!” –Charlton Heston, “Planet of the Apes”
The first major global warming report for this year has come out of Paris, and it’s not pretty. Pretty damn depressing is more like it.
The report, put together by hundreds of scientists, bureaucrats, and skeptics worldwide based on thousands of studies, contains these gems:
- Using the strongest language ever, the report stated that it is “very likely” (that is, a 90%+ likelihood of certainty), that the warming effects we are seeing world-wide (including droughts, heat waves, and mega-strong tropical storms) are directly attributable to man-made causes rather than natural variations in climate.
- Global warming has in fact become unstoppable. We’ve really done it with the planet’s climate. Our only choices now are among mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. The more carbon we mitigate going forward, the less we’ll suffer down the road. But regardless of what we do and barring some blockbuster technology that can suck the carbon out of the air quickly we will be stuck with some measure of rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and desertification for the next thousand years–and we will have no choice but to adapt.
It is unfathomable to me that a single generation of humans has essentially wrecked the planet for our descendants for thousands of years to come–if they manage to survive the changes at all. It is more obvious than ever that we have a moral duty to ourselves and our children to do everything possible RIGHT NOW to minimize the damage we’ve done–and hope for a cure in the next couple of decades from advances in nanotechnology and the like.
Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be posting some articles on what we as individuals can do right now to help stop global warming. It’s a global problem, but each of us can do things to help deal with it if we have the will to do so.
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