Target $18.72, page-7501

"Apart from one almighty flaw, and that is if we are going to increase our use of fossil fuels for many years to come, then It won't matter how well healed you become in the short term because in the medium to long term you and the rest of us may no longer exist, in other words you may become the richest person in the cemetery, depending on how ultimately accurate our climate scientists are in their expectations of future climate change, apparently an extra 2.5 degrees and we are just about done."

It's not a flaw, let alone an almighty one; it's an economic reality.
There are 5 billion people on the planet living in developing and underdeveloped countries, and those 5 billion people want to live like us.
And who are we to stop them by depriving them of the primary energy they need to move up the economic development S-curve?

As for us being "done after an extra 2.5 degrees", that implies a pretty passive response from the citizens of the planet. And one thing I'm happy to back is humanity's ability to develop technologies and solutions to overcome challenges. We've done it for millennia and I don't see why we are going to suddenly cease to be able to do so now.

So, no; I have very little existential angst about not being able to find solutions to rising temperatures; humanity has dealt with changing circumstances since time immemorial.


I mean, when the 1990s poster child for climate anxiety, namely the Maldive island chain, which was going to be flooded by rising sea levels a decade ago, is today spending billions of dollars on developing international airports capable of landing A380s and expanding resorts that can take up to 7 million visitors per year (when I visiting the Maldives in the mid-1990s, the place could take only a few hundred thousand tourists per year)... when I see that kind of thing happening then my brow starts to furrow about the real urgency of the climate matter.

And when a leading country that has its own Special Envoy for Climate (aka "Climate Czar") viz. John Kerry from the US of A, and when that country's current administration starts its term in office with a mandate to wage war on fossil fuels, but today has oil output at record levels which is more than 20% higher than when that term commenced... I find that a bit hard to reconcile with the notion of an "emergency" when it comes to the climate.

If pressed, I'd admit to being far more concerned about a flip in Earth's magnetic di-poles or even an acceleration in the weakening of Earth's magnetosphere, which would expose life on Earth to the dangerous Solar Energy Particles and Galactic Cosmic Rays.

That or Jupiter's strong gravitational field diverting a Near Earth Object onto a collision course with Earth.

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