re: #22 lostlakehiker

We should survive even the worst case of this. It’s grim. Humanity ends up in an enclave in the Himalaya, growing yams. All our livestock die. All the birds die. But we? We live. We’re not just a smart species. We’re pretty damned tough.

This century we’re in now won’t see the worst of it. The Antarctic ice cap will be long in melting. Even the Greenland ice cap will be largely in place. Ice melts when heated, but a big block of ice takes a long time to melt. This block is miles deep and hundreds of miles across.

This is part of our problem. Warnings of doom, that the end is nigh, are all around us. Some, that didn’t pan out, have come from realms not far from science. Paul Ehrlich and his population bomb theory had us in famine by now, for instance.

Most people have no particular knack for science. Most who do are busy men and women with not much time for it, though they could follow the logic if they took the time. Most who do follow the logic and take the time have no particular talent for popularizing and proselytizing. (I’d guess that talent is negatively correlated with a scientific inclination, controlling for general intelligence.)

So the court of public opinion is hearing from all sorts of lying witnesses and all sorts of false trails laid down by canny lawyers. Juries can be led down the primrose path.

The one thing that makes this case different is that this court cannot render a final verdict. Just its own verdict for this year. The case will be tried again next year, and again, the next.

One by one, the barriers to public understanding will fall. Spin things as they might, the other side cannot make this brutal summer disappear from the record books. There will be more of the same.

One by one, Antarctic ice shelves are breaking up. The Arctic sea ice is thinning dramatically—-but who sees thinning? It’s still white, ain’t it? The day of reckoning will be when some windy storm thrashes that thin cover to shreds and the Arctic opens up. That photo, of before and after, will convince a lot of people who cannot or will not follow abstruse arguments. Seeing will be believing.

There is a commercial side to all this, too. Right now, food inflation is ticking along well ahead of general inflation. And that’s before beef prices soar. They will. Cattle are going to slaughter all over the southwest, since there’s no forage. Once that bulge in supply clears, watch out!

Sea levels will rise at rates that cannot be papered over with talk of how it’s been happening all along. Because the rates in our future are very different from the recorded rates for the last few thousand years.

Fifty years from now we’ll have got ourselves into a deeper hole and the problem will be much worse than it would have been had we acted now. But it won’t be the worst it could possibly get, and we won’t get that worst case because by then, if not earlier, we’ll have seen the peril and got cracking.

Even if we lose the political debate today, we can still pave the way to a better future. The technology of wind, solar, and nuclear can be upgraded so that when the time comes, we have really good stuff, shovel ready.

So what do you think of the political party that shamelessly trades on climate skepticism and a general contempt for science?