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.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and […]
Excellent, well written article! Thank you for posting. The only difference I have with this piece is when Wallace mentions that no one was talking about permafrost in the 70s/80s. Brando and I prepared a Climate Change report for an Italian think tank at that time, and permafrost was a huge horrifying warning sign. What amazes me is that since then, we’ve only recently begun to hear more about it.
As the “Daleks” on the Dr. Who British TV series said: “Humans are a biological infestation on planet Earth and should be exterminated” if for no other reason than to save the planet. It is too bad that there are many good humans amongst the whole race, but the many “bad apples destroy the entire crop”, especially when the “bad apples” are in control of the entire race which is on the planet, and are responsible for the Earth’s destruction, because of their greedy nature. This is God’s Earth.