re: #192 LudwigVanQuixote

I think that post was so important, I am going to correct all my typos, clarify it, and repost it. People have to understand this. This is life and death. It is already life and death NOW.

With things like trashed eco systems, AGW and destroyed water supplies, by the time the average American sees the catastrophic effects at home, it is too much 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 push ecosystems far enough, it is like pushing a boulder down hill. All kinds of effects cascade and reinforce each other and the deterioration spirals out of control into a new equilibrium. One you push a boulder over a ledge, you are not stopping it from rolling further. We as a species, do not have two 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 at an increasing rate, and ever more severe 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. 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? A large percentage of them will die. We already murdered them.

The horrible summer we had this year was mitigated somewhat by particulates the volcanic eruption. Even so, the monsoons put 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 already 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.

Lots of good points here. The Bangladesh reference (as well as those islands in the pacific that are slowly ‘sinking’ are watershed events that are being ignored.

Still, unless China and India get on board, I don’t see how anything we can do will make a difference.

In many ways, we really are playing for time.