Climate Change

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

~Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change

We have a climate challenged future ahead of us and we need to start behaving like people who might face real systemic crisis leading to collapse. It did NOT have to be this way, but the best opportunity to avoid the serious consequences of climate change is now decades behind us and we are NOT acting like people who are going to do what must be done.

Responding to climate change involves two possible approaches:

• reducing and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (“mitigation”) and/or
• adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline (“adaptation”).

We can do things to postpone the crisis and/or reduce its severity but we have passed the tipping point and while the weather might be pleasant enough today there is a less pleasant tomorrow ahead of us. If you are ... skeptical ... I have no time to address your ... skepticism.

Mitigation strategies should be employed to post-pone the most serious consequences. More importantly, the time has come to begin considering how we will adapt to a climate changed world.

Things we should be doing now:

• Moving away from the growth at any price strategy toward a steady state economy. The economy must first draw down and then we must both produce and consume less without reducing the quality of life.
• Locally grown food must be subsidized. Ideally, local greenhouses, orchards and gardens must become commonplace in every township of the state.
• Not only must we preserve our best farm land but we must return land to farm use were we can.
• Not only must we preserve our wild land but we must re-wild land.
• Urban planning must include green zones and community gardening.
• Run down industrial, industrial, commercial and residential land must be redeveloped to preserve wild and farm land.
• Communities must make important goods and services available locally; ideally within walking distance of urban and suburban residents or a short drive for rural residents.
• We must invest in real mass transit and NOT just local access to the business district during business hours.
• Local production of clean, sustainable and renewable energy has to be more than a political statement or economic opportunity. Energy production must be local to the point of being distributed to the community level and beyond that to the residential and business level.

I am sorry, but eventually we will loose and the planet will become too warm to support the diversity of life that has evolved on a cool planet with polar ice and temperate subtropical zones. We may be the most climate-adaptive species of large animals to have ever lived on the planet but we are dependent on a diverse web of less adaptive species for our own existence. We must do everything we can to postpone our own inevitable end whether that is an extinction level event or the collapse of civilized life as we know it. At the very least we must make sure that those being born today will be able to live out their natural lives on a planet that has NOT been left uninhabitable by those of us who are now growing old.

Learn more about Climate Change:

• Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (NASA)
• The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)
• Fourth National Climate Assessment (U.S. Global Change Research Program)
  • Volume I: Climate Science Special Report (2017)
  • Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (2018)
• National Snow and Ice Data Center
  • Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis