Talking About Climate Change

THE THOUGHT OCCURRED TO ME, perhaps a bit belatedly, that if one intends to spend the rest of one's life running around like some sort of alarmist predictor of future events, harping on climate change, which is precisely what I fully intend to do, that one might be better off to be prepared to face the consequences, such as rejection, isolation, alienation. The one thing that nobody seems to want to talk about or to even be willing to talk about is climate change, which is happening right before our very eyes, and is obviously going to have a big impact on all of us, on everyone's life, soon. The most frightening thing about global warming, which is the same thing as climate change and may be used, arguably, interchangeably, is not only the inevitibility of it, but the fact that we are already getting a taste of it, a taste which does not bode well for the future, if recent trends are any indication. The problem with global warming is that once it has gotten started, how does one stop it? Global warming began more than two hundred years ago, with the modern industrial revolution, as everybody knows, and, as everybody also knows, the United States is currently the worst offender at polluting the Earth's atmosphere with carbon and heat. The irreversable inevitability is that climate change is going to get a lot worse, soon, and fast. That is indisputable. Our winters are soon going to seem like our former summers, and our summers are going to seem like the Arbian desert, no matter where you live. And yet, for the most part, we the human species seem to be generally ignoring the problem, at least, in terms of the average man on the street, who, after all, is the human race. We just go about our daily business, our petty personal concerns, while the planet fries. What the science community seems to be telling us is to get ready to learn how to survive in a much hotter world. And that's about it. Get ready for a much hotter world, because its coming, and there aint a damned thing we can or are gong to do about it. You don't hear scientists in general talking about ways to reverse climate change, although certainly they must be. I got an email the other day from some organization evidently proposing ways to reverse climate change: I haven't even opened it yet, so, I'm as bad as anyone. Just knowing, however, or believing that somewhere on this planet people are actually inveitng ways of reversing climate change and implementing those ways gives me hope and encouragement, so, I guess I'll keep right on pretending that people are actually doing this, even though I have no idea whether anyone is or not.