This doesn't mean we should give up on carbon and methane reductions (the latter especially occurs through fracking technologies), but that we're far along in the process with huge swaths of Earth becoming uninhabitable within this century.
I agree that rather than widespread fear and fatalism over the prospects of climate change, the larger problem is that folks aren't scared enough to make this a priority.
Let's not fool ourselves and believe that we have effectively "exercised dominion" over the natural world no matter how much we have ravaged it, but consider, as Wallace-Wells says,
the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term "global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.”“The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.This information should minimally find its way into state curricula. And we also need to work with and support environmental groups that are working on climate issues. We should join such advocacy organizations or even re-purpose those that we belong to to address such issues.
See other related posts to this blog:
Fracking Puts Drinking Water at Risk: Here's what you can do
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry by Bill McKibben. We absolutely need to stop the fracking industry dead in its tracks.
We owe this to ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and the unborn generations.
Angela Valenzuela
July 14, 2017| 2:06 pm
We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York
Magazine’s history) and in kind. Within hours, the article spawned a
fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter,
much of which came from climate scientists and the journalists who cover
them.
Some
of this conversation has been about the factual basis for various
claims that appear in the article. To address those questions, and to
give all readers more context for how the article was reported and what
further reading is available, we are publishing here a version of the
article filled with research annotations. They include quotations from
scientists I spoke with throughout the reporting process; citations to
scientific papers, articles, and books I drew from; additional research
provided by my colleague Julia Mead; and context surrounding some of the
more contested claims. Since the article was published, we have made
four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as
well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and
none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science
we have today to the median and high-end “business-as-usual” warming
projections produced by the U.N.’s “gold standard” Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.
But
the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than
the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically
ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however
unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary
possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are,
however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of
terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue,
and what should a journalist make of those risks?
I
hope, in the annotations and commentary below, I have added some
context. But I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that
animated the project from the start: that the public does not appreciate
the scale of climate risk; that this is in part because we have not
spent enough time contemplating the scarier half of the distribution
curve of possibilities, especially its brutal long tail, or the risks
beyond sea-level rise; that there is journalistic and public-interest
value in spreading the news from the scientific community, no matter how
unnerving it may be; and that, when it comes to the challenge of
climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than
widespread fatalism — that many, many more people are not scared enough
than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what
“too scared” would mean. The science says climate change threatens
nearly every aspect of human life on this planet, and that inaction will
hasten the problems. In that context, I don’t think it’s a slur to call
an article, or its writer, alarmist. I’ll accept that characterization.
We should be alarmed.
I. ‘Doomsday’
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It
is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global
warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely
scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the
lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities
they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and
so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded
our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans
are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be
enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
CONTINUE READING HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment