As is often the way with bad news, climate change has always been presented to us with rays of hope dancing round the edges, and one of the biggest of those was that if we acted hard and fast we could limit warming to just an additional 2 degrees; limiting wild weather, perhaps just barely saving the ice caps and some recognisable status quo on our planet.
But that time is past, at a major science conference in Copenhagen the consensus is that we'll be lucky to scrape 4 degrees and it could just keep on going.
Of course, there's karma attached to this, I shed no tears for humanity, we deserve everything we've got coming to us, we deserve a big punch in the face for decades of twats saying "global warming, bring it on, I always wanted to live in the Mediterranean" and "it's all a government conspiracy"; to do what exactly Sherlock? Make us spend less money on high tax items such as oil and utilities? Yes I'm sure.
So, the ice-caps will melt, the polar bear will go extinct, the penguin might too, thousands of species and habitats will just disappear, unable to adapt or evolve quickly enough. Lush farmlands will turn to deserts, glaciers to bare rocks, much of the west coast of the USA will suffer droughts in epidemic proportions killing millions, while the east coast and over a billion other people will be displaced and killed by rising sea levels, Holland will be gone entirely as will colossal chunks of island nations like Indonesia or the Caribbean. As season after season in crops fail much of the third world will starve to death and there will be rioting in western cities for food and water as societies collapse and bankrupt under the pressure. Oil will be running out around the same time collapsing the economy and making it impossible to fertilise farms or distribute produce; our ugly civilisation will fall and be consigned to history to shock future generations with it's unbelievable stupidity.
Who's going to survive? All us dumb hippy tree huggers who have learned to get by without cars, or by growing our own food, or by doing some living in nature, or by not getting addicted to consumption and easy living. As for the rest digging their mobile phones, supermarkets, alcopops, chavving about, suburban 4x4s, rain forest loo roll and Heat magazines? Well, they're a bit fucked to be honest.
If it were just these effects I'd welcome it on, a world freed of billions of selfish individuals and forced back into an agricultural state maybe free of international politics and money markets is pretty awesome really, nature will be god and there's barely any oil left to do it all over again. The tragedy for me is the loss of animal life, the loss of nature that had thousands and millions of years left on it's due date which we've brought crashing forward, the loss of something as beautiful and inspiring as a polar bear to be just a memory of grandparents and dusty books. I like polar bears, now one day I'll have to look my child in the eye and explain why they will never see one.
We have an interesting couple of decades ahead of us, and with the acceleration of events it really is our problem. This week marks a reality check in time; we fucked it up, billions of us are going to die, and if we continue to ignore the warnings it could be even more, we're past the point of no return and still running further, but not for much longer.
Full story at
Canberra Times
