I've come to the (I feel) inevitable conclusion that we are already well and truly fucked. I will still do what I can to slow the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy, in the hopes that the majority of my children's lives will be made incrementally better, should they choose to remain on this planet (and, it is assumed, that they may actually have a choice, but there's no way I can know).
We're on the wrong side of the story arc here. It's too late. The damage has been done, and it will continue to snowball even if we stop putting carbon (as both CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere today. Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works - the temperature gradient hasn't yet finished equalizing, the latent energy (and, for that matter, the latent GH gasses) stored in the oceans and, indeed, the land itself hasn't yet made its full effects felt, and we've successfully argued and argued and argued about it without actually doing anything substantial enough to make a meaningful difference.
But that sort of hopeless talk makes me sound like a crackpot, and I've typed this sort of message into many a text field on the Internet over the past year before deleting it, or pressing cancel, or closing the browser tab. But today, in a moment of vulnerability, or for another reason I can't hope to know, something is telling me to press "submit".
We're on the wrong side of the story arc here. It's too late. The damage has been done, and it will continue to snowball even if we stop putting carbon (as both CO2 and methane) into the atmosphere today. Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works - the temperature gradient hasn't yet finished equalizing, the latent energy (and, for that matter, the latent GH gasses) stored in the oceans and, indeed, the land itself hasn't yet made its full effects felt, and we've successfully argued and argued and argued about it without actually doing anything substantial enough to make a meaningful difference.
But that sort of hopeless talk makes me sound like a crackpot, and I've typed this sort of message into many a text field on the Internet over the past year before deleting it, or pressing cancel, or closing the browser tab. But today, in a moment of vulnerability, or for another reason I can't hope to know, something is telling me to press "submit".