Climate Crisis Perspective

The effects of the climate crisis have clearly begun.  More and more extreme storms, insect-borne diseases affecting more areas as they warm, and most floods in the U.S. are related to the climate crisis.

And it's likely to get worse, with more effects, and with worse and more widespread manifestations of known effects, as that study on floods shows.

Seas rose faster in the 20th century than in the previous 27 centuries, and this (other) new study shows that without the climate crisis they would have risen much less, or not at all.

A study of U.S. forests shows that they are all threatened by effects of the climate crisis.  Not just in the west or the north or the south, not just certain species of trees, but all the forests, everywhere.

And so on.  The good news is that a lot of things we're worried about now, people won't be worrying about in the near future.  The bad news is it's because they'll have newer and potentially bigger things to worry about.  Sometimes because things will be gone. In any case, things will be different.  Eventually, almost everything.

The jobs of the future are likely to be more basic, requiring a combination of skills now almost lost, plus skills more sophisticated than most of us have.

That's just to deal with the effects.  Addressing the causes is another very big job, with the potential, and probably the necessity of transformation.

It's going to take more than conservation, more than the hopeful but small movement towards clean energy technology, even as oil prices tumble.  It's going to take public policy and business working towards the same goals.

It's going to take new technologies, some of which are today's advanced and maybe crazy ideas, and some of which haven't yet been dreamed.

Some of the technologies most often  proposed in the recent past are very dangerous, and potentially more disastrous than immediate climate crisis effects.  But that can't stop us from using knowledge to see if we can't make trees more resistant, bring the oceans back to health, or develop better and easier clean energy forms, or (even if this isn't a climate change problem per se) stop the global die-back of pollinators--bees and butterflies--quantified in this new study, before our food supply crashes.

Skills being developed here and there in small pockets of sanity will need to be brought up to scale.  These include the skills of peace--of shared decision-making, of defusing violence and so on, because that's what everybody really fears about this--the fears of every gun for itself, zombie apocalypse, big wars that devolve into local wars over very scarce resources.

The politics of the moment obviously can have a major impact on all this, but we place our hopes in the people who are more or less ignoring this noise and who are concentrating on developing those skills and that knowledge that will be useful in the coming years.  And who teach the children well.