The climate change situation we’re in gets crazier by the day.
Like most people, I lack the educational background to check up on the validity of scientists’ worries about the climate future. But I can count and there seems no question that a strong consensus of those scientists expressing opinions and journalists following the issue is increasingly alarmed about the climate future.
I also have no real basis in personal experience for believing anything’s gone haywire with the climate. I read that the world’s average temperature is rising, but was that warm spell in March part of the trend? Maybe it was record -setting, but the records it broke were mostly set way back before the era of greenhouse effect concerns. In my body’s fickle memory, March has been pretty much cancelled by the strikingly chilly June we’ve been having. Until yesterday, which broke a local record—a record set in 1931.
A story in this paper this past April titled “Ever-changing Cape climate” says the rate of rise of the sea around us slowed 5-6000 years ago but has begun to creep up again and could rise as much as three feet in the next century. A concerned up-Cape friend sends me computer projections of the Cape looking like a bunch of islands in coming decades.
The gist of the newspaper article is that “the effects of rising sea levels and other climate-related changes are being experienced now and must be addressed. ” But the same article says the rate of increase now is only 2-4 millimeters a year (a little over one -sixteenth of an inch) and apparently that miniscule rise is not being experienced now by those who should be most sensitive to it. I got an email from a longtime volunteer Harwich shellfish warden corroborating the opinion of a Wellfleet harbor expert in finding no evidence of rising seas over there either. I was relieved to hear it. It would have confounded one of the bits of science I do remember from school, about water seeking its own level, for seas to be rising in some places but not others.
If , as exposed as we are to the sea, we are a canary in the coal mine of global warming, you’d have to say we’re still chirping, if naively.
If the scientists say we should be afraid, be very afraid, we should probably be afraid. However, we don’t seem to be. The main climate change-related news around here is that wind turbines, once touted as the great hope of reducing greenhouse gases, are on the defensive on almost all fronts, at least in these parts. Part of wind’s problem is that the price paid by (that is, experienced by) neighbors is getting better known, now that there are more of them. It turns out that experts’ predictions of unpleasant effects of global warming just don’t compete with the here -and -now unpleasantness of the wind turbines.
When it comes to solutions it’s not exactly fiddling while Rome burns—more like fiddling around.
So, earthlings, what’s going on? Are we deer hypnotized by oncoming headlights? Naïve frogs in heating water headed for the boiling point? The cartoon of the guy halfway down on a fall from the top of a skyscraper with the upbeat caption “so far, so good?”
Is it the long term effect of all those smiley face stick-ons and Alfred E Neuman “What, me worry?” bumper stickers? Is it the national overdose of SSRIs?
It would be convenient to think that we the 99% are concerned as hell but helpless victims of indifferent governments, but I’m not sure that’s it either.
Maybe the sort of creature we are is just not able to get worked up about longterm climate change, only shortterm weather. Are we discovering that we are hardwired unable to worry about the future for the sake of our children and grandchildren, although it sounds nice to say we are?
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