I would have once described myself along those same lines as you have indicated and I hope I never end up a "doom and gloom" merchant, but I have definitely moved more towards the "somewhat alarmed" camp, rather than my usual sitting on the fence position.
This Global Warming argument is kind of a "straw man". The planet is warming, no doubt, but finding the truth, if it exists, is near on impossible. It's politically charged. It feeds a lot of scientists who must go endlessly to governments with their begging cups. It's a smoke-screen that polarises people into political camps and divides us so that both sides tend to neutralise each other into inaction. And those who do march and speak out, carry placards and get in peoples faces over Global Warming, tend to be people that are really easy not to like very much. They, and I generalise unashamedly, look like people the average Joe would not want anything to do with and they tend to make themselves very easy targets for the ignorant to have a go at.
But who can deny deforestation, it is said to run at 15 billion trees a year. Several acres cleared a minute, every minute of every day and the vast and dramatic loss of bio-diversity? They say that 3 billion birds have disappeared in the North Americas and Canada since 1970, primarily through habitat loss, a crash in the insect population and chemicals for agriculture.
Global Warming is like the temperature you get when you are sick, it's a symptom of some way bigger malaise that just keeps getting pushed aside because the only game in town is, Global Warming. The rest of the body is in need of the medication or the temperature will soon drop to as cold as death.
We could segue from bad coal practices to cleaner coal practices. We could then segue from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives. We could do it systematically with good will so that it didn't tank economies, in fact it might create new economic opportunities. We could support Third World countries so they retained the last of their natural environment and even pay them to replenish their environments. We could begin to ameliorate degraded lands and restore natural habitats, but that's not going to be an easy thing to do when everything is driven by GDP numbers, multi-nationals and a somewhat deliberate fudging of statistical information making it really hard to be informed.
Sure there are people of good will who are doing their best all over the world, but it's piecemeal and the problem is too big and has no boarders. It requires a united global effort. We have the knowledge to slow the environmental degradation and then to turn this around, but we are fire-walled off from real solutions. The UN has veto systems in place that render it all but useless, our political systems govern via short term expediency, multi-national bodies answer to nobody, indebted Third World countries run by somewhat unsavoury characters, are powerless in the great power grab of the powerful nations. If they chopped down and sold every tree it would only pay the interest on their debt, and then of course there's general human apathy to deal with.
The only thing that will turn this around is when the screaming starts, that is someway off I suspect and I'll be long gone by then, but there's a day somewhere in our future that it will start if we don't wake up soon, because we have crossed over into the age of consequence now.
Expand
