Climate, Becoming Extreme

IN AND AROUND the Sydney, Australia area thirty nine inches of rain recently fell within twenty four hours. Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate their inundated homes, the usual scenario in massive flooding. Contrast this with the nightmarish drought and wildfire season which ravaged Aussie down under two years ago, the one in which nearly a fifth of the continent went up in flames, a billion or so animals were killed, a few of them human. Extreme, violent weather, which over a long period of time can be dexcribed as "extreme violent climate", is as everyone should by now know rather than deny, the result of us humans injecting billions of tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere in our never ending pursuit of prosperity. Those who deny this reality, principally conservative Americans, merely contribute to the inertia to change human behavior which we so drastically need. Those who ackowledge the obvious reality of climate change seem to be falling all over themselves to delay the necesary changes to the global human economy which would give future generations a fighting chance to exist and survive. Whether any species of intelligent being which calls itself "intelligent" and "civilized" is actually deserving of that description remains questionable. Nowadays when we pray for rain, which is often, we must add a caveat: send us rain, oh lord, but, please, not too much, in a world subject to alternating bouts of flood and crought. The window of opportunity, as we like to say, for reversing global warming is closing, precipitously. Ironically, the knowledge and tools we need to accomplish this are within our grasp. What we seem to lack is the will power to make the fundamental changes to human behavior necessary. I am becoming increasingly glad that I was born when I was (1955), which means that I will likely die somewhat before the worst effects of climate change manifest, and potentially disrupt human organized civilization to the point of global societal collapse. Einstein once said that the world war after the next will be fought with rocks. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the next world war will consist of rock throwing. The best we can hope for is that we will live long, happy, productive lieves, and die when old. When and where one is born is paramount. It determines much. Who among us doesn't fantasize occasionally about having been born and having lived in another, hypothetical time and place? All things considered, one could do much worse than to have been born in the United States during the post World War period Or, as a friend said: "We'll be getting out of here just in time". Considering the state of human "civilization" at present, it may well be that I was actually born a few years too late.