re: #150 Kragar (Proud to be Kafir)

I stand by my opinion that millions will have to die before anything gets acted upon.

You may be right. However with things like trashed eco systems, AGW and destroyed water supplies, by the time that happens it is too late. It is not just too late for the dead, but too late to fix and too late to prevent from getting much worse.

What people really don’t get is that planet scale systems have unbelievable inertia. Once you go down a certain path far enough it is like pushing a boulder down hill. You are not stopping it from rolling further. We as a species do not have to years to keep pushing - let alone push harder.

We are already committed to the loss of nations like Bangladesh. There is nothing we can do to save them. Those millions will be flooded out and their agriculture that was not claimed by the seas, will fail from heat waves and being drowned by intensified monsoons. More land will go under water and monsoons in that region will continue to cause massive flooding that washes away homes and crops. Where will those people go? Of course they are poor, brown and not Christian so no one really cares in the West. And don’t anyone dare tell me that we in the West do care. We already pulled the trigger on their plight. Where will those millions go?

The horrible summer we had this year was mitigated somewhat by particulates the volcanic eruption. Even so, the monsoon but over six million Pakistanis out of their homes after suffering heat waves that reached to 128 degrees F, the Russian crops failed to an extent that they halted grain exports, and Chinese crops failed sufficiently to cause their food prices to jump. As it is now we are already seeing disease vectors migrate in major ways. Spain, France and Italy are seeing cases of Dengue fever which used to be something people in Africa worried about.

We are committed to more and more of this.

If we stop pushing the boulder now, it will most likely stop rolling in a place where we can deal with the results. If we continue pushing long enough, that boulder (to abuse the analogy) ends up squashing our entire civilization by the time it comes to rest. Releasing vast amounts of methane from sloppy extraction techniques on a national scale is a huge effect since we have some of the largest methane reserves. In terms of the immediate suffering of thousands (already! from being poisoned by this process) or even the millions likely to suffer from poisoning, the long term effects, make that statistic pale in comparison.

We do not have the time for the situation to get so intolerable that even the average Fox viewing idiot is convinced. By the time that happens we will have committed to vastly worse and there will be no way to stop it.