Climate change: here to stay?

  

On Friday March 9, during a record day of warmth, Ileana takes in the scent of a blooming Magnolia by the Washington D.C. Smithsonian Castle.

It’s here guys. Global warming is no longer intangible. Throughout the United States, over six thousand heat records have been set this March. In the past few decades, extreme weather events like heat wave, storm surge, sea level rise and flooding having become have become more prevalent and with higher intensities. Between global population rise, standard of living increases, static economic infrastructure, and political malaise, humans have emitted more carbon dioxide in the last 50 years than throughout our entire existence and are having great difficulty stopping the trend.  

Some of these things you’ve heard, you know, and like me are searching for the answers or waiting for realistic measures to reverse climate change. The environmental world is now pushing something called adaptation, to circumvent the politics and overall taboo issue of climate change. Adaptation recognizes that our climate is constantly changing and that strategic responses to these changes are necessary to preserve the earth’s life systems. Yet, less psychologically damaging than climate change, which is embedded with the difficult truth that human life systems are causing the Earth’s climate to change, adaptation is value neutral and doesn't fault humans.

It notes that our climate is changing and will continue to change, and that the impacts of climate change are affecting our earth’s systems and these effects are predictable within certain intervals. In other words, there is no way to ascertain exactly what will happen to our earth’s systems, but there is enough of an understanding to plan for a probability of events, take action, and then continue to adapt a coherent strategy for a given earth system. 

I have great hope for our species, but less hope for our federal governing apparatus. Environmental strides, such carbon accounting, local and statewide greenhouse gas compacts, and robust environmental networks, have emerged despite climate change censorship in the Bush regime, and increased oil drilling during the Obama administration. Meanwhile non-profits are fueling an environmental awareness that’s spreading like wildfire among consumers, and some of the corporate world is responding to the fervor by supplying sustainable products, gridlock in Washington is preventing much needed and eagerly awaited environmental legislation to incentivize the rest of the business world and the major utilities to bring us to the energy future we’ve been envisioning for the last half century. 

Check out this podcast on adaptation.

 This is just on feel, but once China surpasses the United States in renewable energy supplied per capita (I’m thinking 2020-2025) and signs the Kyoto Protocol or an equivalent, the federal government will get its act together.