Every news bulletin seems to show yet more extreme weather events around the world – flash floods in Italy, Turkey, Colombia and Brazil, temperature breaking records across Asia, mass bleaching of coral in the warming southern oceans, wildfires again across Canada; how do we deal with this?
First, we need to face up to it. Only the most blinkered can still say they do not ‘believe’ in climate change when the scientific evidence is overwhelming. Climate scientists no longer debate warming; debate is now over the rate of acceleration of that warming! Dr James Hansen, ex-head of NASA, indicates we have blown through 1.5C – the 12-month mean global temperature just hit 1.65C (Berkeley Earth). There may be fluctuations, but the trend is an accelerating warming and our timeframe to influence this is closing. It’s a matter of physics, not ‘belief’ and it could all soon be out of our hands.
So where does this leave us? Dahr Jamail, whose book The End of Ice documented changes happening to the cryosphere with first-hand accounts of shrinking glaciers and melting ice sheets, is featured in a video on just this subject called ‘Living in the time of dying’, available to watch on YouTube.
Changes we have triggered, like melting ice, are already unstoppable and will have profound impacts, even here in the West where we have been cushioned largely from the changing climate – so far. But Dhar’s message is that it is coming for us too, within our lifetimes. He feels we need to be much more public and open about the difficulties ahead. Millions are already suffering; we must do all we can to try and slow the problem down, even if we cannot now stop it.
All the political systems that have brought us to this place have according to Dhar been ‘abject failures’, leaving us with a perilously uncertain future that politicians are still struggling to even acknowledge, let alone address. We are on our own against those who still seek profit at all costs through a destructive fossil fuel driven growth economy that is only driving us faster over the ecological cliff.
We need to find the courage to face reality, so we can slow down, reassess, adapt, and change. We need to find acceptance of where we are, to find the lightness that will help us through the hard times to come. Our planet will continue to warm; our infrastructure, built for a different climate to the one we are now finding ourselves in, will break down. We will face severe shortages and conditions that could trigger violence and unrest.
But we have the choice to face the coming hardships with love. We can still love, appreciate and protect the Earth for as long as we can; love and care for each other to the best of our ability and start today to build strong, self-sufficient communities to give us our best chance of facing our uncertain future with our humanity intact.
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Rosie Stokes and Pauline Meechan
Dukeries Eco Watch