The Frustration of Hopelessness

We all know that sometimes I feel vindicated over something. In this case, that vindication is of little consequence offering no pleasure.

We are overwhelmed by the size, entropy and scale of problems with the climate. Even those people that don't believe it is "real" - a vanishing few, or those that don't believe it is human induced - a stubborn corporate / political class that can lock themselves away from it for now, even these people can see the writing on the wall. And the writing says, "Be afraid, be very afraid."

Now, I will go off on climate change after the jump. But first a few funny scary bits from an article that mocks our ability to respond despite the .

 I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation. 

Often, the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.

But it seems impossible to change, so many choose to ignore it. I get it, we ignore our own mortality  - else we couldn't function. We ignore warnings on cigarettes, wine, speed limit signs, bridge freezing signs and a plethora of other items, and we do just fine. So we ignore Climate Change.

I am pretty sure I've said this about a million times, but we now have to focus not on ending climate change, but on how to live in a new world. Our generations 100 year floods or 500 year fires of the 1,000 year hurricanes will be future generations normal. Maybe they will abandon the tropics the way abandoned the Artic and Antartic for thousands of years.

At this point, we should start the transition to a new world now. We should still strive to cut carbon emissions to try and make the future habitable for people. That includes more green energy, more nuclear power, carbon capture machinery and much faster response systems. Perhaps a sliver of the trillions we spend on the military can be moved towards disaster response and set up an alternative command structure there  - like we did with the Space Force (sad head shaking at the idea of a Space Force).

But it also means that we stop encouraging and underwriting people moving to the coasts that will be flooded by 2 feet of water and tides. That 2 feet is how much will be lost almost immediately if / when the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica calves. It means getting a lot more irrigation ready in the entire country. It means a lot more water project enhancements to prevent Dam burstings in deluge rainfall. It means that the world someone needs to come to grips with MILLIONS of environmental refugees in the next few years. Worst, those refugees will come from poor places that aren't white, and they are the hardest to integrate.