What, me worry?
Did you read the latest on the shrinking of the polar ice sheets?
Last week, the journal reported the rate at which Antarctica is losing ice has tripled since 2007. The relegated the story to an inside page, and most news outlets didn’t cover it at all. Likewise, reports of a steep decline in Arctic ice since 1979 have been given scant attention.
Melting polar ice means the earth is warming and ocean levels are rising. This is happening much faster than anticipated even five years ago.
There are a lot of other alarming reports about climate change that are lost in the daily babble on TV and the internet.
To cite just one: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher than it’s been in 800,000 years, guaranteeing the earth will continue to warm even if we stop carbon emissions immediately.
There are disastrous, almost inconceivable changes to come. Coastal cities from New York to Tokyo underwater. Frequent, violent storms. Droughts. Species extinction.
But a lot of people have simply decided to disbelieve the science, and others are ignoring it because the impacts of warming seem so distant.
We take the world as it is now for granted. We turn on the faucet and expect clean water to come out. We flush the toilet and expect our wastes to go away. We expect electricity at the flick of a switch.
We shop in stores that are packed with merchandise. We expect fuel for our cars to be readily available. This is civilization as we know it. And it all depends on the climate humans have experienced for generations. But it’s not guaranteed to remain the same — and it won’t.