Killing Our Kids and Shaming Ourselves

 ALBERT EINSTEIN, eighty years ago expressed interest in purposely changing the Earth's climate, the purpose being to increase agricultural production through global warming in a hungry world. Good intention, bad idea. Two hundred years ago, a Swedish scientist, Gustavus Arinnhius, toured European cities, saw the smokestacks belching carbon soot in the air, and predicted that eventually all the soot in the atmosphere would trap heat, warm the atmosphere, and cause climate change. We can't say we weren't warned. We have always known, or should have. Now, its too late, too late to prevent drastic climate change caused by atmospheric warming. All that remains for us it the possibility to prevent the worst possible future consequences of global warming, as  "gift" to posterity, the dubious gift of possible survival and existence, under adverse climatic circumstances. Recent and current weather patterns across the United States are shocking, and otherworldly harbinger of near future conditions. To anyone who remarks that this summer seems like the hottest ever, as people remark, accurately, every year, the best reply is that this is actually the coldest summer you will ever experience for the rest of your life. Violent and extreme that weather patterns have become and have been for the last several years, future weather conditions will almost certainly ever more violent and extreme, regardless of what we do or don not do now. We can anticipate more frequent and severe droughts with consequent more frequent and severe wildfires in all parts of the country, not just the west. we can anticipate more frequent and violent storms during all seasons, including bitterly cold winter storms, and more frequent and severe floods. Climate change means both extreme dry and extreme wet, extreme hot and extreme cold. All of it is caused by our greater concern for our satisfaction of greed, our material prosperity, over concern for the health and well being of future generations. For more than forty years scientists have warned us about climate change, its drastic, tragic consequences, and what we must do to avoid it. We have not listened, preferring to ignore it in favor of continuing our lust for wealth. We could have prevented all this, but now it is too late, too late to avoid all but the most severe consequences, even if we can do even that much. All because of our inactivity, our shortsightedness, our unrelenting greed. We the currently living will go to our graves covered with shame and contempt,shame and contempt which our descendants will surely assign to us, even if we deny it ourselves, and they will do so fairly, and appropriately.