Watching ABC news.......what the hell is going on with the weather???

[hatrack]

60. The problem is that we keep referring to it as a "problem" . . . .

If you say "problem", what's the instantaneous problem word-association response? "Solution", and we departed that realm long ago. What we have is a dilemma, not a problem. Human beings can produce solutions when confronted by problems. By contrast, dilemmas tend to produce only consequences. In this case, most of them will be bad, and some of them will be flat-out horrible.

The dilemma is that human society as currently constituted (for all 8 billion of us) depends on two physical impossibilities - one is endless growth as demanded by economic, political and religious ideologies, and the other is the carbon-intensive physical processes that make endless growth possible for now - or at least a short-term illusion of endless growth.

The best science we have appears to indicate that the Permian extinction, which took out 75% of land lifeforms and 90% of marine species, took place over a period of 300,000 - 500,000 years. It was driven largely by CO2 from enormous volcanic eruptions. We're now on track to add a roughly comparable amount of CO2 to our planet's atmosphere, but we'll do it in somewhere around 300 to 350 years.

So yes, conserve, teach, plant, grow, simplify, preserve, respect the natural world - because inculcating those kinds of skills and values may help provide a way forward for some. But that last 10% of a pound of carbon emitted today will not be removed from the atmosphere by natural processes for roughly 10,000 - 20,000 years, and atmospheric CO2 is the highest it's been in over a million years - and we know that from direct physical measurement of ice cores.

As Samuel L. Jackson said in Jurassic Park, "Hold onto your butts."