On Europe’s Nonlinear Climatic Future

The probable impacts of climate change are anything but straightforward, and thus predictable. From the standpoint of mid-2024, huge changes could be in store for Europe and other continents. The magnitude of the shifts is particularly worthy of notice, such that the changes being unleashed even as of 2024 and especially in the decades following the 2020s will be difficult to reverse or even change even if a Green revolution were to take hold. It bears noting that in 2023, the increase in energy usage globally outstripped contribution from alternative or clean energy, such that even more fossil fuel was used to meet the post-pandemic demand. A look at Europe provides a good case study of the unstoppable magnitude of some of the changes already underway.  

I cropped Duncan Porter's photos so the area covered in the background would be the same.

Duncan Porter took a photo of the Rhone glacier in Europe on August 4, 2024. He had taken a photo fifteen years minus one day earlier at the same spot. The loss of ice is palpable, reflecting the fact that Europe was as of 2024 the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures running 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels whereas the global increase stood at 1.3 degrees higher—very close indeed to the baleful planetary threshold of 1.5 degrees.[1] In short, Europe had already crossed that boundary set by scientists, and the empirical evidence could be seen in the massive loss of ice at the Rhone glacier.

When Porter took his “after” picture in early August, 2024, Europe was in the midst of “one of the most prolonged and intense” heatwaves on record, with temperatures consistently exceeding historical averages, “with some areas experiencing unprecedented highs. This prolonged heat . . . led to significant ecological stress, particularly on heathlands, which are critical stopover points and breeding grounds for migratory birds.”[2] With temperatures at 2.3 degrees higher on average than the pre-industrial level, Europe could expect such heatwaves as a matter of course, or the new normal, with significant ecological shifts resulting.

Lest linearity be assumed, Western Europe also faced the prospect of the end of the Gulf Stream, which is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). That current sends warm ocean water  over to Northern Europe from Florida and warms Western Europe, especially during the winter. Should this current cease from an influx of melted fresh water, European winters would be much colder (think Moscow). By 2024, it had been well established that melting freshwater from Greenland’s ice sheet was slowing down the Gulf Stream, and earlier than climate models had suggested. The question was when rather than if. In 2023, Politico reported, “A collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was likely to occur ‘around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions’—perhaps as soon as 2025 and not later than 2095, said Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen from the University of Copenhagen in a per-reviewed study published in Nature Communications.”[3] In other words, for Europeans sweating out the long heatwave during the summer of 2024, the perplexing news was that “Atlantic Ocean current that keeps large parts of Europe warm could come to an abrupt and catastrophic stop any time in the coming decades.”[4]

From the vantage point of 2024, prolonged heatwaves during summers and much colder winters could thus be the volatile, nonlinear climate-future of Europe. Uncharted territory is a good way to describe the possible, even probable changes in the offing. I don’t believe even scientists knew how the colder ocean water during the summers would impact the heatwaves, and how the average 2.3 degree temperature increase would impact winters that would otherwise be colder the loss of the Gulf Stream. Such interaction effects may pale next to severe heatwaves and no Gulf Stream, such that hot summers and very cold winters could run for decades through the 21^st century.

Meanwhile, in North America, the Midwest was projected to get much hotter, with some places in the Southwest possibly becoming uninhabitable, while Florida and the East Coast would be cooler than otherwise if the Gulf Stream shuts down. So, Europeans were not alone in being beset with unknown interaction effects. Going into uncharted territory may be titillating, but when the reality of a changed world sets in, the excitement will likely quickly wear off. With such huge changes as the Gulf Stream shutting down, climatic shifts will be of such magnitude that shifting back would not be likely.

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1. Euronews Green, “It Made Me Cry,” Euronews, August 6, 2024.
2. Luke Hanrahan, “Heathlands under Siege,” Euronews, August 5, 2024.
3. Karl Mathiesen, “Gulf Stream Shutoff Could Happen this Century, Scientists Warn,” Politico, July 25, 2023.
4. Ibid.

Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20^th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.  

In 2023, Earth “shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency,” Coernicus announced on January 9, 2024.[1] The use of the word, shattered, seems hyperbolic, or exaggerated, to draw attention, but sometimes small differences in numbers represent significant change that is difficult for us non-scientists to perceive. “Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit).”[2] Very gradual change is the default for the Earth’s climate, which is why a long-term perspective is needed even to assess the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.

“The agency had calculated that 2023 was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming,” the agency’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said.[3] To be sure, not all of the 1.48 Celsius increase from pre-industrial times was due to pollution. “Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes. . . . Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere.”[4] Even so, 1.3 accounts for most of the 1.48 degrees, and is thus significant. This can also be inferred by the estimate that “2023 was probably hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. Our species, homo sapiens, has only been around for 300,000.

It looks like hope is running dry on whether economies will push us—or, more accurately, whether we will push ourselves—beyond the 1.5 Celsius limit of global warming agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement. To be sure, “(f)or the first time, nations meeting for annual United Nations climate talks in December [2023] agreed that the world needs to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, but they set no concrete requirements to do so.”[5] However, even though renewable sources of energy had “expanded at record rates, fossil fuels maintained an 82% share of total primary energy consumption” in 2022.[6] Even at the same share, “carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose 0.9% in 2022 to a new high of 34.4 billion metric tons, indicating lack of progress in curbing worldwide carbon output.”[7]  Emissions thus “moved further away from the reductions called for in the Paris Agreement.”[8] Juliet Davenport, president of EI, said, “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”[9] So even in the midst of shattering records, governments generally were still allowing their respective economies to increase their emissions, or at least enough governments were resisting taking measures that would reflect knowledge of how rapidly the planet was warming overall.

The lack of concrete requirements had rendered the Paris Agreement toothless, and thus no match for the pressures that governments are always under to facilitate and not thwart economic growth and not to stand up to corporate donors to political campaigns in democracies. More abstractly stated, non-binding international treaties are no match for the human urge for instant gratification and the desire for more wealth (i.e., greed). In spite of our great reasoning ability, our species also has expediency “hard-wired” into our biology. A big unanswered question is whether research into means to “capture” carbon in the atmosphere (and oceans) will undo the damage caused by our species’ heedless impulsive refusal to self-regulate itself.

In the movie, “The Matrix,” agent Smith likens our species to a virus because we keep spreading. In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion; by 2024, 8.1 billion humans were alive on Earth. Clearly, such a enormous increase in just 123 years must be significant for the planet's ecosystems, even a shock. Few of us even realize that, in line with Thomas Malthus’s thesis that human population can outstrip the world’s supply of food—which stirred controversy among Deists who could not accept such a large flaw in God’s design of the Creation—the exponential increase of our species’ population is a, or even the, underlying cause of the rising carbon emissions from cars, trucks, heating, agriculture, and industrial production levels. Simply put, more people means more cars, and thus more exhaust; more people means more widgets, which means more factories as well as more freighters on the seas, more trucking and more freight-train hauls; and more people means more dwellings, which means more heating and air-conditioning, and thus more demand for heating oil and on coal plants for more electricity. These relationships are really quite simple at the macro level of aggregation, though admittedly I am putting to the side the shift from coal and oil to renewables. We are all organisms, and thus we cannot but consume and use resources; the more organisms, the more food, for instance, is needed. Malthus, an Anglican priest and political economist, was right in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, when the global population of humans stood at 1 billion (1900, a century later, being just 650 million more). If an intelligent design of Creation can indeed be inferred—an inference challenged by Malthus’ theory of over-population wherein geometrical population growth can outstrip arithmetic expansion in resources—self-regulation would presumably be crucial in our species and yet the laggard responses to the Paris Agreement would suggest that we suffer a want of self-discipline on a collective (and individual) level.

From the susceptibility of elected representatives to being beholden to big business, and the insatiable greed etched into the very raison d’etre and being of a company and the manager function, we can infer the very weakness of the human urge to self-limit or voluntarily restrain ourselves relative to an otherwise maximizing, or schizogenic, inbred and culturally-encouraged tendency to resist or ignore soft limits (i.e., those not subject to enforcement). Fortunately, the jury is still out on whether the technological advancements that human reason is capable of (e.g., carbon capture) will rescue our species from its own intractable instinctual urges that are felt so strongly in the moment that our species would even allow itself to deconstruct in the long-term as if this were pre-determined without free-will.   

1. Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in 2023,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Rapier, “Why the World Keeps Setting Global Carbon Emission Records,” Forbes, August 1, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

Climate Change: Human Failure or Divine Will?

First Reformed (2017) contains fundamental ideas concerning the human condition and wrestles with the relationship between religion and politics.  Ideas play a significant role in the film, hence it can be used in support of the thesis that film is a viable medium in which to make philosophical (and theological) ideas transparent and derive dramatic tension from clashing ideas. In this film, the ideas that clash concern the role of religion in the political issue of climate change—or is that issue primarily religious?

The full essay is at "First Reformed."

Do You Believe in Global Warming?

On September 16, 2012, “Arctic ice covered just 1.32 million square miles—the lowest extent ever recorded. ‘The loss of summer sea ice has led to unusual warming of the Arctic atmosphere, that in turn impacts weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, that can result in persistent extreme weather such as droughts, heat waves and flooding,’ NSIDC scientist Dr. Julienne Stroeve noted in a press release. ‘There's a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,’ NASA scientist James Hansen said, adding that he believed, ‘unfortunately, that gap is not being closed.’ What the scientific community understands is that Arctic ice is melting at an accelerated rate -- and that humans play a role in these changes. According to the panel, humans are ‘really running out of time’ to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from reaching levels that would precipitate runaway climate change. Hansen warned that even maintaining current concentrations of approximately 390 parts per million for several centuries ‘guarantees disaster.’”[1] Nevertheless, record amounts of carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere in 2016 to at least 2018, and 2016 was the hottest year on the planet as of 2019.[2] What makes an intelligent species, homo sapiens, go in the wrong direction even from the outset of an announced, guaranteed disaster? Timing and mentality have a lot to do with it. 
I suspect the non-scientist public, including the people with vested economic interests in continued pollution, dismissed the warning of disaster in 2012 in part by erroneously considering the scientific knowledge to be belief. Had news of an astroid due to hit the planet in seven years been announced in 2012, I suspect the astronomical knowledge would have been considered as such, rather than mere belief. It is interesting that the timeliness of a disaster, specifically whether it will hit the people living or those yet unborn, bears on whether knowledge is viewed as knowledge or just belief. 

 Ice melting in Greenland.   NYT

The mentality that sustains the gulf between what the scientists know and what the public believes includes the odd belief (held nonetheless as knowledge!) that scentistics only have beliefs regarding the climate might say, “I don’t believe in God,” or “I don’t believe it is going to rain today,” but people don’t usually say, “I don’t believe in math,” or "I don't believe in chemistry." That is to say, belief is not typically applied to replace the appelation of knowledge in fields of knowledge! In effect, the mentality contains a refusal to respect the enterprise of science. This is not only ignorance that can’t be wrong. How can ignorance make such a claim? Anti-foundationalism knows no better example than the arrogance of ignorance that cannot be wrong. The mentality assumes that recognizing knowledge in science would undercut a cherished political ideology. This assumption is an over-reach, as is the application of belief itself.
So the ice has kept melting as our scientific community has been relegated epistemologically into mere opinion or politics by too many people. The astounding implication is that this has occurred even though we as a species do not have the luxury of such a mentality. Even the possibility of “guaranteeing disaster” suggests that we as a society or species cannot afford to ignore the scientific consensus even though science is not perfect. That is to say, science does not prove a hypothesis; rather, successive null hypotheses are rejected, giving us added confidence but not certainty that the remaining hypothesis is valid.

Generally speaking, when even the survival of our species is flagged, or at the very least continued human habitation on Earth is to come with disasters, the rational self-preservation motivated recourse is to err on the side of what the scientific data is telling scientists.  To presume an overarching hegemony of political ideology may in retrospect look reckless. The choice of such a priority may even look pathological. Perhaps this is an element in human nature that could bring the species itself down. It should come as no surprise that the human mind can be a double-edged instrument capable of achievement and self-destruction even of the species itself. Even ideology may be viewed as a double-edged instument capable of giving people something to believe in yet also capable of embellishing arrogance and beligerance. Both the ignorance and ideological tartuffery seem to enjoy presumption when the disater is guaranteed for far-off generations. The basic instinct for self-preservation is more easily subdued or drugged. It would only be just, therefore, for the currently-living to suffer at least some of the effects of the guaranteed disaster themselves. Greed, selfishness, arrogance, and ignorance, which may all be hardwired into human nature, are to blame. Flying so high to the sun on the supposition that man is divine, a human being is bound to fall to the ground in a fiery mass of self-conceit that takes itself to be a falling star but is actually just a confused mess. 

1. Joanna Zelman and James Gerken, “Arctic Sea IceLevels Hit Record Low, Scientists Say We’re ‘Running Out Of Time,” The Huffington Post, September 19, 2012. 
2. Kelly Levin, "New Global CO2 Emissions Numbers Are In. They're Not Good," World Resources Institute, December 5, 2018 (accessed October 21, 2019).

Increasing Rates of Acceleration of Ice-Melt: Difficult for Humans to Grasp

The findings of two studies published in January, 2019 indicate that Antarctic’s ice had been melting “at an alarming rate” since 1979.[1]  The rate of melting looked at precisely tells part of the story of why people in general were even in the year before 2020 still catching up in realizing the full extent to which climate change was going on. The key here is the concept of acceleration. The rate of ice loss has not been consistent in that ice disappeared faster in each successive decade.

Specifically, ice loss in Antarctica increased from 40 gigatons (a gigaton is one billion tons) per year from 1979-90 to 252 gigatons per year from 2009-17. That’s a six-fold increase in the rate of acceleration. In fact, the melt-rate accelerated most in the most latter decade. The last two decades saw a melt-rate up 280% compared to the first two decades. This change in the rate of change is extremely difficult to grasp; it is like trying to watch for changes in the rate of acceleration in your car. Paired with this greater difficulty is the fact that the problem is not getting worse at a constant rate; rather, the getting-worse is itself accelerating. The change occurring during the studies’ time-frame of four decades was also difficult to notice because it was being caused by deep relatively warm water hitting the bottom of the glaciers in east Antarctica; the ice-changed-to-water was going on below.[2]  

Whereas the Arctic’s ice is over water, the Antarctic’s ice is generally over land so the additional water raises sea levels more. Yet that won’t stop that water from raising the Atlantic Ocean off Miami in Florida, and sooner rather than later taking up about a third of the present peninsula. Given the very significant population in southeast Florida, that the land there would more likely be underwater sooner than anticipated increases the changes of emergency situations, such as mass relocations. In other words, the studies imply that we as a species could be caught off-guard both from not having kept up on the accelerating rates and the effects of those rates in bringing climate change sooner than would be the case had the rates been constant across the decades. A feedback-loop could develop whereby increasing rates trigger changes that in turn increase the rates even more than otherwise. The situation could at that point be out of humanity’s hands, yet the insufficient action while it can still make a difference has been caused in part because an increasing rate of change is difficult for humans to grasp, let alone see.

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1, Brandon Miller, “Antarctica Ice Melt Has Accelerated by 280% in the Last Four Decades,” cnn.com, January 14, 2109. On holes in a glacier in Antartica, see Sheena McKinsey, "Gigantic Hole Two-Thirds the Size of Manhattan Discovered in Antartic Glacier," CNN.com (accessed January 31, 2019).

2. Eric Rignot et al, “Four Decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Balance from 1979-2017,” PNAS, January 14, 2019.

Hidden Warnings of Climate Change: A Paralyzed Species Looks On

Global warming has been so difficult to slow down through political means at least in part due to the fact that most of the action has been going on in the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding permafrost land (which, it turns out, is not so permanently frozen after all, so methane is leaving that ground for the atmosphere). All this is far from almost all of the world’s population, so social consciousness has not been changed nearly enough for demands by voters that governments act in enforceable ways, globally. In short, what has been occurring in that far Northern region has both dwarfed consciousness of the impact of human-released carbon/methane.  The proverbial canary in the coal mine has been hidden from view for all but a few (e.g., scientists). The implications are truly astonishing.
According to Alan Buis at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in 2013, “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”[1] In general terms, if the pace of global warming outstrips the ability of the ecosystem sustaining the human race to adapt, the species can be expected to suffer with inadequate prior notice. The planet's climate may get warmer too fast to allow us to adjust, for instance, in terms of such essentials as food and water. Hotter summers may be just part of the challenge. Lest it be forgotten, the more complex the organism, the less adaptable it is to external change. In addition to the biology of complexity, the motive of greed makes us even less adaptive when the costs are up-front and the benefits totally or even mostly in the future. 
So what is it that was going on up North that had Alan Buis so concerned in 2013? In his article, he points out that over “hundreds of millennia [that’s a very long time], Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon [because dead plants and animals do not decompose in the top soil]—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons).”[2]  This amount of carbon is significant for two reasons. 
First, the carbon is in the soil that is likely to thaw. Once thawed, that soil, which has been warming even faster than the Arctic air, releases carbon into the atmosphere.  Second, the 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams dwarfs “the 350 petagrams of carbon that have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850.”[3] If you are reading this essay while eating in a restaurant, this is when you flag down your server and calmly say, “Check please!” so you can get your affairs in order.
In the frozen soil that covers 9 million square miles, melting would also emit “massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere,” according to Terrell Johnson of weather.com.[4] He adds that methane is “much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year period.”[5] Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the E.U. have predicted tremendous economic costs as a consequence of the expected release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane in thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.[6]. That is by no means all of the permafrost up North.
According to Buis, climate models at least as of June 2013 had not yet adequately incorporated the impact of carbon and methane that could be released into the atmosphere from the “permafrost” soils, which, by the way, had warmed as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees F (1.5 to 2.5 degrees C) in 30 years.[7] Regardless of the decade, we could have absolutely no idea where the Earth’s climate would be headed—and thus whether our species would even survive.
Although humans beings have not been holding blow-torches to the frozen tundra as if playing some sick joke on nature in the middle of the night, the vast majority—98 percent—of climatologists agreed in 2013 that the “human contribution” had been a significant factor in the carbon dioxide having reached the 400 ppm (parts per million) benchmark for what Johnson calls “a new danger zone."[8]
We as a species may have inadvertently helped light the fuse on a process even more significant than carbon in impacting global warming. To be sure, at the time, it was difficult to ascertain how much or even whether that methane-process would be mitigated or reduced in its extent should reducing our burning of fossil fuels mean that the Arctic air would not warm up quite so much as would otherwise be the case. Nevertheless, the sheer magnitude of the carbon and methane still caught in the frozen soil and the gigantic effect those gases would have if released into the atmosphere suggest that it is in our own best interest as a species to do what we can to reduce the amount of additional warming of the Arctic air as much as possible.
Making the matter more confusing, the warming at the Arctic has been more than at the equator. The slope between cold and warm air between the two areas fuels the Arctic jet-stream, or "the Polar Vortex." Less energy means the circling river of air around the Arctic is loosens and thus can belch Arctic air southward. Think of that high river of air as like a wobbly rubber-band. The wobbles send more Arctic air further south, the last week of January, 2019 being but one instance. Together, the instances give the false impression that global warming is not occurring. "We had a really cold winter last year," a man in Chicago, Illinois or Berlin, Germany, might say. He might conclude that global warming is a hoax, then he might vote. Hence Jefferson and Adams agreed that a viable republic (and we might generalize to world) requires an educated and virtuous citizenry. 

For all our amazing accomplishments technologically beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the human race has shown itself to be remarkably blind concerning not only its own footprint, but also what might be unleashed in nature itself as a result of our thrashing about. In the film Avatar, Neytiri chastises Jake Sully, saying “You are like a baby. Making noise, don’t know what to do,” on account of his ignorance on how to conduct himself in the forest. The irony is astounding in that we humans have been able to get to the moon, and yet we are so ignorant—arrogant even—regarding how we are impacting our climate and ecosystems, both of which we rely on for our very survival as a species. In all likelihood, the sheer clumsiness in our corporate footprint and the astounding arrogance in our socialite swagger will be outstripped sooner than we suppose by the subtle yet enduring ways of nature. For all our power and money, for all our numbers across many lands, we are indeed a small species that presumes itself to be great.

[1] Alan Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?” NASA News and Features, June 10, 2013. Accessed July 16, 2013.
[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs,” weather.com, July 15, 2013.  Accessed July 16, 2013.
[5] Ibid.

[6] Nina Chestney, "Arctic Methane Release Due to Climate Change Could Cost Global Economy $60 Trillion, Study Reports," Reuters, July 24, 2013.

[7] Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”
[8] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs.” 

Climatic Presumption: What is the Forecast?

Al Gore stated that we face a choice regarding whether the earth’s ecological system will remain viable for our species.  He cites the carbon that is frozen in the permafrost in the north.  As the permafrost melts, carbon is added to the atmosphere, making it “difficult” for the human species to live.   I am not a scientist so I have no means of knowing what the state of the research is on these matters.  Nor am I particularly interested in debating it.   In my view, if there is a chance that we could be effectively ending our our species, we ought not to be held back from acting in a prudent fashion even if it is “just in case.”   I understand the economic costs, and that some are particularly attached to short-run costs (and less enamoured with long-term benefits).  Still, that the debate itself would be allowed to stall even a “just in case” response reflects badly on our species.   At a worse case, it could be something like two parents debating which of them will get their baby out of their burning house.  Meanwhile, the baby burns.   We would call that a dysfunctional family, would we not?  Still, no such appellation goes to those involved in the continuing debate on climate change.

It strikes me that we as a society may be too innured in our own presumptuousness to even realize how badly we are handling such decisions.  I can’t believe that the society is predominantly made up of the two, rather vocal, extremes on the matter.  The extremes are presumptuous in their determination to continue the debate unless they get exactly what they want while the rest of us have been guilty of allowing them to dominate the decision-making process.  Consider, for example, a reasonable person saying, “ok, we need to make a decision,” and one is made.  The refusal to make compromises (whether an extreme in the US following a rigid ideological agenda or the Chinese government presuming that national sovereignty is absolute) is not only childish, it is rather arrogant concerning that the eventual demise of our species might hang in the balance.  Even this “might” should be a wakeup call that posturing and debating evince a selfishness that the rest of us ought not to countenance.  Yet we do.  We are too passive, those of us without a dog in the fight.   The truth is, we all have a dog in this fight.  Are we to be survived by cockroaches?   Wouldn’t it be fodder for a divine comedy were the antics of the cockroaches superior to the presumptuousness of humans?   The species left standing is the one that wins.  

I can visualize a later generation (of humans) looking back at our generation as incredibly selfish and incompetent even to reach a decision.  “They knew what might hang in the balance, and yet they were so caught up in their own petty circumstances.”   It is like we are captains on the Titanic debating which way to turn after it being reasonable to believe that there is an iceberg somewhere ahead.   It could even be that we see the iceberg and still we debate.  Such pettifoggery is mere dribble in the divine comedy that may well already be in Act III.  

We are so small, even smaller than the cockroach, and yet we presume ourselves to be so big.  We we to have the distance of perspective such that our immediate pathos would not blind us, how would we view our society…ourselves?