Through the Climate Portal: Humanity's Tragic Flaw

[GliderGuider]

Here's a brilliant analogy for our collective inability to admit that climate change is an existential threat.

Through the Climate Portal: Humanity's Tragic Flaw

I'd been diagnosed with an inflammatory disease of the large intestine called ulcerative colitis in 1984. The disease essentially directs excess heat/inflammation toward the walls of the colon. Over time, this can result in scarring, narrowing and, eventually, obstruction of the passageway.

Though doctors had repeatedly warned me of this scenario. I had refused to follow their treatment prescriptions. Why had I refused? For my own (in retrospect, quite unwise) personal reasons, I did not trust the doctors and so ignored their advice. Now there I was on the stretcher, my life unnecessarily put at risk.

Looking back, I realize that a part of me simply had not been able to imagine this to be possible. It was as if I had stepped trough a portal. Up to that moment, I had been "David," living my familiar "David" life, with its ups and its downs. On the other side of the portal, a single train of thought crowded out all other motivations and desires: "Please, make this stop, please make it better. Please make it go back to the way it was before."

At the rate we are going, one thing is certain: A day will come when we will be stunned. Perhaps temperatures will cross a threshold beyond which our staple crops cannot grow. Perhaps the glaciers that provide water for hundreds of millions will shrink beneath a critical level. Perhaps storms of warming and rising oceans will make life in our many coastal megalopolises untenable. There are many candidates: We are moving ourselves out of our climate "Goldilocks Zone."

We will have crossed through the portal (in actuality, in the vast and complex climate system, there will be multiple lines to cross with multiple portals) and a single train of thought will crowd out all other motivations and desires: "Please make this stop, please make it better. Please make it go back to the way it was before."

[Ghost Dog]

1. At the rate we are going...

Nicely put. Although this "we" will be viewed in different ways by different social groups in different locations. The "super-rich" will already be taking steps, perhaps, to mitigate the consequences for themselves, or will merely assume that wealth can buy immunity; they and no doubt larger social tracts will comfort themselves with the idea that it will be not them but the poor, the elderly, the sick, a "bunch of foreigners" or whatever who will, as usual, be hit.

There are those who still expect to get rich out of this.

We are already observing much social disintegration.

[pscot]

2. The sad thing is, it didn't have to be this way.