All or Nothing

The climate crisis is not a political contest.  It's not an ideological debate.  It's not a test of which tribe you belong to, or a leading indicator of your likely income group.  It is a threat to today's children that they will definitely have to deal with.  If we do not address its causes and recognize its effects, it is a threat to human civilization, perhaps to humanity, and together with other human-caused changes, to life as we know it on Earth.

It is not completely necessary to understand this to begin the needed change, though many people do.  A new Bloomberg national poll finds: By an almost two-to-one margin, 62 percent to 33 percent, Americans say they would pay more for energy if it would mean a reduction in pollution from carbon emissions..

These include a vast majority of Democrats, a hefty majority of Independents (60%) and more than 40% of the Republicans surveyed.  Half of those who plan to vote in 2014 are looking for candidates who support addressing the climate crisis.

Some of this response is driven by the effects already seen.  Insurance companies that are expected to pay the costs of dealing with these effects are starting to sue municipalities that aren't taking seriously the threat of the climate crisis by preparing for it.

But there are larger contexts that come into play.  As the insurance example suggests, the economics involved are shifting.  As Kim Stanley Robinson and others have been pointing out, once the true costs of the climate crisis are admitted, the cost of addressing of it is comparatively small.

The dimensions of this are put into perspective by a new study:

The benefits human civilization enjoys from the world’s natural ecosystems — grasslands, marshes, coral reefs, forests, and the like — amounts to something in the vicinity of $142.7 trillion a year. That’s over eight times the value of the entire U.S. economy ($16.2 trillion a year), and almost twice the value of the world economy ($71.8 trillion a year).

For those who want a succinct and illustrated summary of the science, I've seen nothing better on the subject than the recent episode of the new Cosmos series entitled "The World Set Free."  That's also the title of the H.G. Wells novel that first warned of the threat of atomic weapons, and ended with humanity finally addressing the problem before it became too late.

Here's an article about this Cosmos episode, but it is best seen--and it can be, for free, on the Internet here. 

As for the ultimate stakes, try the three minutes plus in the embedded video above, from another episode of Cosmos.  Its host Neil Degrasse Tyson is spending an appalling amount of time dealing with creationists and deniers, something (as I note elsewhere) that Walt Disney didn't have to do in the 1950s when his science-based programs for children portrayed the history of the universe and the evolution of life.  Nor did Carl Sagan in the original Cosmos, though he may have received enough flack to make violent evangelicals into the principal villains in his novel Contact.

This video features the imagery from the new series with Carl Sagan's voice from the old.  What we're seeing is an animation of what Voyager saw when it paused near Neptune to turn back and take a last photo of the Earth, before heading into interstellar space.  I suggest you click the full screen icon to properly watch it.  It is an amazing three and a half minutes, that provides visually and in words the perspective in which the climate crisis is appropriately seen.