Time, Running Out

IN THE "That's hard to believe" department, the "where did all the time go?" category, it has now been twenty years since Al Gore's seminal movie "An Inonvenient Truth" was released. Its likely that many people who had been undecided, "on the fence" about this crucial issue, left the theatre convinced that climate change is indeed very real. The more the merrier. You go Al Gore. Who knows? Perhaps someday future historians will write that the late twentieth century American Vice President Al Gore founded the first effective climate movement which, after much struggle and resistance, at long last grew strong enough to tip the balance away from climate denial and towards climate action, and that the resulting pro climate movement succeeded in electing enough political leaders who finally, after years of struggle, convinced corporate leaders and the corporate investment community that there is money to be made by fighting climate change, even more money than can be made by causing it and ignoring it. As climate change becomes worse, and more people are impacted directly by it, the percentage of "believers" increases, and public policy, driven by public opinion, begins to become more sane, more receptive to reality. The Trump administration is pursuing policies intended to essentially subsidize the dying coal industry, incredibly, almost as if having joined a death cult, bent on human extinction. Climate deniers must bend over backwards denying obvious scientific reality, They refuse to accept the simple reality that when you burn coal,coal dust end up suspended in the atmosphere, mainly carbon, which traps more heat in the atmosphere than does the normal nitrogen oxygen air mix. Its strange to think of people rejecting simple scientific reality, because the truth is that the environmental beliefs and policies of progressive political thought are urgently needed now. Meanwhile, good old conservative coal and oil, which are slowly but steadily killing us, both have full conservative unwittingly suicidal support. Thus the Republican party and the American conservative movement underpinning it is a sort of unwitting death cult. But hope remains. Slowly, all too slowly but inexorably, climate denial seems to be waning. Let us so hope and pray. We reject the truth, accurately said Goethe, only because we fear that accepting it will destroy us. Rejecting the truth about global warming and climate change will indeed destroy us, and in fact is already causing human misery and death at an increasingly alarming pace. The situation regarding the slow huan resposne to climate change makes it increasingly urgent and necessary to "rub it in" to all necessary faces, most notably conservative visages in denial. We must accept reality before we can begin in earnest to save ourselves from it. There will soon come a time when no amouont of human assisted healing of the sick and angry planet Earth will restore its fragile paper thin ecosystem to health. Surely we can all see, looking at pictures of blue planet Earth taken from outer space, that the Earth is a tiny speck of miraculous matter in an inconceivably large universe, and, whetehr or not the universe if full of life of barren of it, is suffficiently miraculous to go to any length necessary to save. Even if the universe is full of life, the millions of species on tiny blue Earth are surely unique in all the cosmos, and that if we indeed commit suicide by poisoning the Earth to death, we will have commited the greatest of all possible crimes, by destroying what the universe created, and what it obviously fully intends to exist, perhaps, as Carl Sagan said, as a way of knowing and understanding itself.