The signs are getting clearer.
Credit: Josh Edelson/AFP
The potential costs of climate change, already the subject of heated debate, may actually be understated. It’s not just the potential disruptions to weather systems, agriculture and coastal cities; it’s that we may respond to those problems in stupid and destructive ways. As the philosopher and cartoon character Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Consider how poorly we have responded to many non-climate-related problems. In the case of Brexit, for example, the Leave movement was arguably responding to some real problems. The European Union bureaucracy is too stringent, and perhaps the U.K. did not have an ideal arrangement with immigration. But Brexit is careening toward disaster, with no good plan on tap, the two major parties in splinters, the British pound declining, the Irish “Good Friday” agreement at risk, and the U.K. seriously talking about food stockpiles and other emergency measures.
It would have been better if the British had responded to their country’s problems in a less extreme way, […]
This article points out a pattern that I have been fearful of for sometime. We humans have the intelligence and needed skills, both management and technical, to prepare for the foreseeable changes. Will we come together to face the existential challenges or will the ideological challenges distract and overwhelm us? Will it be, we are in this together or will it be whose to blame – off with their heads. Based on current national leadership supported by a passionate following and the unstoppable greed of the upper classes makes it hard to see a positive outcome, short of a military coup anyway.
You are right, Will, about the ideological challenges distracting us, but hopefully the existential reality of climate change will finally be seen by all and we can have a softer political coup at the poles in November, if the voting is not disrupted by hackers that is.