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Monday, 26 May 2008 |
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...about Climate Change. Michael Pollan asks some significant questions about personal responsibility for climate change. Here's a few paragraphs from the article. Highly recommend reading the rest.
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change,
and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me
the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore
scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that
the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by
climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing
credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when
it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the
magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he
was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.
There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing
nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage
to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and
it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that
seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the
warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models
predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the
rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water
in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become
more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of
carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate
scientist recently? They look really scared.
So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?
I do.
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