Residents walk across the frozen Songhua River in front of smoke stacks at Jiamusi,
in China's northeast Heilongjiang province Sunday Dec. 4, 2005.
(AP Photo/Greg Baker) | ASSOCIATED PRESS
Climate change has already left its mark "on all continents and across the oceans", damaging food crops, spreading disease, and melting glaciers, according to the leaked text of a blockbuster UN climate science report due out on Monday.
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Yes it is having impacts in every part of our world. That said, I've resigned myself to the conclusion that, as a global civilization, we're not prepared to take effective action against climate change.
ReplyDeleteClimate change is just one of several existential threats we're facing. Others include over-population, over-consumption, and ocean acidification. We cling obsessively to the insane notion of infinite, exponential growth in GDP - production and consumption - despite the reality that we live in a fully maxed-out and very finite world.
We continue to pursue policies that guarantee the failure of our global civilization but history is littered with societies and civilizations that made conscious choices aware that those decisions would eventually doom them. We're just doing it today on a grander, global scale. The fate we're facing is very much one of our own choosing.
I'm doing an online course at the moment put on by the war studies department of King's College, London, examining the link between globalization and future wars. Fascinating stuff.
I have to agree with your comments Mound. It's as if we are all living on an Easter Island planet. The greed and short sightedness of the corporation led governments across the world is staggering.
ReplyDeleteMound, thank you for your detailed and well thought out comment. I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteThe course you mentioned, of the King's College, sounds indeed fascinating. I am also waiting to read some day the book/books you're writing.
Ray, you're quite right about the greed and short sightedness. It looks that we humans do not have the ability to visualize the future and that what havoc our actions are causing and going to cause in future. We are on the route to self-destruct indeed.