Had governments responded accordingly to the threat over the last few decades, perhaps a degree or two of warming could have been shaved off the worst-case projections.
The reality is, no government on Earth is currently willing to take the dramatic measures necessary that might begin to mitigate what is coming our way.
Yet there is a soft-denialism across much of the political left as well. It is easy to be critical of the climate crisis deniers of the political right. All of this on top of the fact that Earth is losing a stunning 1.5 acres of rainforest every second. At some point in the not-so-distant future, the Amazon rainforest will regularly emit more carbon than it absorbs…yet another critical tipping point for Earth. In 2010, a drought in the Amazon rainforest released as much carbon dioxide as the total annual emissions of Russia and China combined. Global tropical rainforests, which are critical to biodiversity, are already so degraded that they now release more carbon annually than all the traffic in the United States.That last fact was underscored by the conclusion of a recent United Nations report that at least one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction. Compared to the Permian mass extinction event 252 million years ago (in which 90 percent of life on Earth was annihilated), carbon dioxide is being injected into the atmosphere ten times faster and the extinction rate is already faster. We are now in the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, this one caused by industrial civilization.We are currently in the middle of what is on track to be the warmest decade since record keeping began. 2018 was the fourth warmest year ever recorded, with the only warmer years being 2015, 2016, and 2017.I reminded them of some facts that they surely already knew, but which we are often too uncomfortable to sit with for long: The next morning, I read his message to the UU congregation, and went on to speak to them honestly about how it is now far too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe. To me, that is utterly dis-empowering to people, as well as, I believe, unethical. I could not more vehemently disagree with his last line. I now know, this is not the process that most people need or should go through. My family struggled, my health struggled, my world was very dim. I came out of it by feeling the sorrow, by finding my deep-seated tendency to face extremely difficult problems head on, from finding and having long discussions with an eco-psychologist, from reading Joanna Macy and her wonderful books, and from reconnecting with Mis Misa through meditation grounded in the earth, water and air.īut it was a long and difficult process. That was a long and dark year, as I know you understand. It consumed me…įrom that point forward, I would guess it took me at least a year to come out of that negativity and rebuild a vision for the future of my son. I felt like a dog possessed, digging for a bone. As we discussed at your place, I really had to dig to find out how bad things were. Few people have the knowledge and courage to speak in such a way.
I absolutely believe you are speaking the truth in the scientific sense of the current state of ecological affairs.
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