Too Late?

I have just spent the past two weeks in the North Carolina mountains on vacation enjoying the cool and clean air around Lake Chatuge.  The sensation of elevation and breathability is profound.  Living in Naples for the past 16 years has been wonderful, however that wonderfulness is quickly ebbing as the climate inexorably changes.  What used to be hot but bearable summers have now become periods when even walking outside to go from our main house to the guest-house, where our video business resides, is beastly and anti-human.  The sun and the air are not good for humans anymore.  The sun feels like a hammer that beats on my head even with a baseball cap on, and the air is uncomfortable to breathe because it is so warm and laden with moisture.  Things are much different from when I moved here in 2002.

As the debates go on by the Democrats about how climate change is one of the main issues on which we need to act, we do nothing.  In fact it is worse than that.  Our present administration does everything it can to exacerbate the conditions that are changing our environment—reducing regulations on all sorts of polluting by fossil fuels; denying the science that for the past 30 years has proven them wrong; quitting our participation in the only global movement thus far to acknowledge the changing climate and provide a framework for action.

Time is running out.

I listened to Greta Thunberg from Sweden give a TED talk online and I was moved.  I urge each of you to do the same. 

Greta's Talk

Greta is a 16 year old girl from Sweden who made headlines this past week from her trip over the Atlantic on a catamaran to emphasize the need for action.  She is an incredibly articulate and persuasive agent for change that will bring about awareness of the peril we are all in.  Her view of her life and what she and her children and grandchildren will face is stark and unnerving.

Her generation wants to know why we are not doing anything?  The facts are clearly present.  Greenhouse gas emissions are steadily increasing causing global warming.  She wants to know why there is no action to try to reverse it.  The fact of the matter is that the past 20 years are the hottest on record in history.  Many believe we have already passed the tipping point.  Greta asks what she should tell her children 50 years from now when they ask why we didn’t do anything when we clearly saw the handwriting on the wall. 

Why don’t you try to answer that question right now?  I can’t.

All I would be able to say is that the politicians were unconcerned and didn’t believe the science.  Do you think the children of 2075 will buy that?  They will be living though disease, famine, dislocation of large populations caused by rising sea levels, collapsing economies, social and civil upheaval; and finally, mass extinction of living species, including our own.

You may think I am an alarmist.  The problem here is that the mass of uninformed people in the civilized world are all like frogs who are put in cold water on a stove and as the water heats up, they don’t realize that they are slowly dying until it is too late to jump out of the pot.

Are you aware that many people of our younger generation are deciding not to have children because they don’t want to bring them into a world where the environmental conditions will be so difficult to survive?  How about your children?  Ask them if they understand how their lives are going to change?

The solution to the increasing anxiety on the part of everyone about this extinction level event, that is slowly but inexorably overtaking us, is to talk about it.  Do you notice how when the subject is raised, most people just shrug and say, someone will figure it out, or ‘it makes me too anxious to talk about it’?

Time is running out.  Wake up and talk about it.  If you don’t, you will be doing your part to doom our children and grandchildren’s future to a hellish condition that you may not be alive to experience, but they will.