Talking About Climate change

CLIMATE CHANGE is the most often written about topic on this website, and why shouldn't it be? Is anything more important? Is any topic as important? Compared to climate change, are there even topics anywhere near being as profoundly, immediately, desperately important? If anything is as important or more important than climate change, its news to me. Climate changes is the fact of life, the future of the world. It effects everybody, and its here now, damaging our civilization seriously, and getting worse by the year. So why not talk about it, right? For me, its gotten to the point where I really don't want to talk about much else, particularly in face to face, in person, real time conversations, where, as they say, the rubber meets the road. The one thing I've noticed, no matter where I go, no matter to whom I try to broach the topic, is that people don't seem to want to talk about it. Especially the less formally educated. In general, the more formally educated the individual, the greater the willingness to discuss climate change. At least, that's my perception, and there seem indeed to be more progressives among the formally educated, and progressives generally seem more willing to discuss the matter. But, overall, there's just not very much interest in it. As if why bother, there's nothing I can do about it anyway, so why bother, because when we're talking about climate change we're not talking about me, and I want to talk about me, me, me, a self absorbed American. Conversely, among the completely informally uneducated, and particularly among the devout fundamentalist Christian conservative types, interest in the topic is near zero. In fact, you can't even begin to engage in a conversation about climate change without these people bringing the lord into the conversation, as in, the lord is coming back soon anyway, so what does it matter? The lord is coming soon, so what does it matter. That's the attitude which puzzles me the most. Aside from the obvious fact that the uber devout, including Jesus himself, have been predicting the lord's imminent return for nigh on to two thousands years, and that it hasn't happened yet, and shows no signs of happening, despite all the humorous attempts to conflate current events with omens of lordly approach. Aside from this inconvenient truth, what, one might ask, does the alleged soon to occur return of the lord have to do with climate change? Rather than assume that the lord, upon his return, will either fix the problem or render it irrelevant by rapturing the righteous into heaven and consigning the unrighteous to eternal torment, why not clean up the planet in honor of the most important guest ever to visit it, like a good house cleaning before receiving good company? Then, there are the semi educated folks who never took high school chemistry, which is all that is required to understand the essential facts behind the scientific fact of man made climate change, who try, nonetheless, to use their knowledge of nature to disavow human responsibility. Even the evangelicals, for whom the Earth tends to be quite young, try to offer the oft heard argument that "the climate is always changing anyway", as if that obvious fact has anything to do with human influence on the environment through mass carbon pollution, as if nature's eternal flux somehow prohibits or mitigates human destruction. Well, maybe it hopeless. Maybe your average citizen will never become interested in discussing the fate of the world they live on. But, lord willing, we will become interested in doing something about it, no matter what the lord's plans are otherwise.