Climate Crisis: Cause and Effect

There are two parts of the climate crisis: the causes and the effects.  The causes are the factors that create global heating, mostly greenhouse gases pollution.

Global heating has effects, generally called climate change, but more specifically its effects that injure and kill people: sea level rise and consequent permanent changes to the landscape, drought and fires, storms and floods, higher temperatures and longer and more severe heat waves, and in turn their effects, which include disease, hunger and war.

A New York Times story tried to find the best places in America to weather the climate crisis for the next century.  It's not a pretty picture. "Forget most of California and the Southwest (drought, wildfires). Ditto for much of the East Coast and Southeast (heat waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels). Washington, D.C., for example, may well be a flood zone by 2100..."  And as someone in the story notes, all these projections are merely for the next century.  The effects will continue beyond that, perhaps getting worse, especially if this generation does not deal with the causes.

The Los Angeles Times was among the news organizations to cover a study last week: "Fewer than half of American states are working to protect themselves from climate change, despite more detailed warnings from scientists that communities are already being damaged, according to a new online clearinghouse of states’ efforts compiled by the Georgetown Climate Center."

In a story made timely by the Ebola epidemic and the cases in the US but with application to climate crisis effects,  a Scientific American writer analyzed the data and found that instead of gearing up for public health emergencies,  funding for public health preparedness by the Center for Disease Control has actually been cut to the tune of a billion dollars between 2002 and 2013.

Much is being done as a byproduct of something else, or when local leadership prevails or finesses the work on effects without mentioning the "controversial" cause.  But sooner and perhaps not too late, we'll need to be clear on what needs to be done and why, on both the causes and the effects.