It’s exasperating to me that people still wish to ignore this massive (and fatal) problem. It’s right there in front of us. We see the super storms, the bizarre and unpredictable weather patterns, part of the globe turning into inhabitable desert, rain forests being demolished, animals killed in larger numbers than ever before, the oceans poisoned to the breaking point.
So why are there millions of otherwise intelligent people ignoring it? Why isn’t more being done?
Contrary to what most think, the younger generation is way more hip to understanding the consequences of climate change than the mainstream media would have you believe. Millenials are getting on board in large numbers to try to learn and do what they can to combat the fallout from this most serious threat. Meanwhile, the baby boomer establishment who are in control continue to ignore it for the most part. If climate change is even mentioned, it’s to throw a bone to the environmentalists clamoring for something to be done, and soon after dismissed. A great example of the level of deniability in government is Miami, Florida. While it struggles to keep the city from going underwater, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, flat-out ignores anything to do with climate change, and has forbidden the phrase from being used at all.
The leaders in charge of the biggest offender world-wide, the United States, are doing virtually nothing to combat climate change. In a time when fossil fuels should be a thing of the past, they are handing out thousands of new oil leases. Fracking is growing. Pipelines are breaking all over the US on a daily basis, and the oceans may not recover in for generations — if ever — from the major spills and many other abuses that have created dead zones. Still, these disasters do nothing to spur our elected leaders into action.
In northern California this year, the area was beset with freak fires which melted cars but left trees standing. The same inferno-type fires are going on in southern California, raging for the past few days in Ventura county and near Los Angeles. This is not normal, and until the past few years, ‘fire season’ had never gone beyond October. It’s December.
The number of catastrophes this year alone are mind-blowing, as this chart from NOAA shows:
The only solutions for people are to start being more thoughtful about their own wasteful ways. But we have hit the tipping point, and unless people get active soon in a big way, there won’t be any future for the next generation.
tubegalore
To hear some presidential candidates on the campaign trail, climate change is nothing to worry about a hoax foisted on the American public as part of some government conspiracy. But that s not how it s seen by 750 experts from business, academia, civil society and the public sector. Surveyed by the World Economic Forum for its latest Global Risks report, the respondents rank climate change as the gravest threat facing the planet over the next decade. In its potential impact, it s a more serious problem than weapons of mass destruction, cyberwar, terrorism, interstate conflicts, and every other conceivable menace.