Surviving Our Fragility With Hope and Action

EVERT DAY the reaity of climate change becomes more apparant. The changing climate is forcing itself and awareness of it upon us so glaringly that those who still deny it, mainly Americanconservatives,will either have to reform thir thinking and acknowledge reality, or be ridiculaed and shunned into intellectual submission and silence. No matter where you live, the rapidly changing weather patterns are plainly visible. Early springs, longer summers, milder winters,violent weather. All plainly observable. Simultaneously, the precisemechanisms of this human manufacturers of this human-made crisis are being understood better, with more precision, the causal connections mapped out in ever greater detail and accuracy. In 1991 Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl published "Our Angry Earth", an early warning about humanity's negative impact on the Earth's ecosystem. Our basic awareness is not new, our better understanding is recent. The many books being published on this topic of greatest importance reflect this inhanced understanding. Among the best climate change writers is Michael E. Mann. His two eminal works are "The Climate War",and the more recently published "Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons From Earth's past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis." Among his major themes is that climate change has happened before, and that humanity has shown great resilience in adapting to it. In fact, he reminds usthat during nearly the entire 4.54 billion years of the Earth's existence humans did not exist,but that climate change itself allowed the earliest pre-human species to evolve and flourish sufficiently to enable later versions, ourselves included, to evolv into being. It was natural climated change which created homo sapien sapiens, it was climate change which provided the impetus for hunter gatherer humankind to become agricultural neoplitic humankind, and the most recent manirestation of natural climate change, the "Little Ice Age', which occured rougly between the years 1600 and 1850, caused widespread suffering throughout the world, but ultimately proved survivable by our species. The fact that climate change does indeed occur naturally, independent of human activity, provides a seemingly valid excuse for climate deniers to assert that the present climate change is also of natural origin. This, of course, is pure nonsense. What makes Mann's work so special is his integration of human history and science, which he uses to demonstrate that our ancestors have already survived periods of great climate change,and that we, their descendants,can once again. But like all other reaonable, informed people, he stresses that we must act now to reverse the current trend, because time is running out, and, if we tke no action, or worse et if we continue on our same course, the ultimate extinction of our species and all other life is not only likely, but inevitable. We should not despair. Indeed, we should be hopeful. The salient fact, however, is that a hopeful can do attitude msut be accompanied by tangible action, now.