Climate chaos coming — oh more discouraging news
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
So I’m headed back from the Faith, Economy, Ecology Forum in DC and checking my email. Someone sends this: Climate chaos predicted by CO2 study: World will have exceeded 2050 safe carbon emissions limit by 2020, scientists say, an article in the UK’s The Independent. So much for my relaxing evening.
Once again, the evidence indicates that emissions are rising faster, and therefore dangerous global warming is occurring faster, than already alarming earlier predictions.
Once again, you see how we are running out of time.
Oh, let's not ruin this (NASA photo: the blue marble)
The time for action is now, but our people are not demanding this. They are not demanding this because this scary news is not getting the attention it deserves, and because we are still slow to get the seriousness of the crisis — not a future crisis but really quite present.
Over the next decade, we will soar right past the carbon budget that we must live within in order to avoid raising the global mean temperature to something not seen since the evolution of the human.
Do we really want to be part of this experiment?
Action is required. Consciousness-raising is required. Let’s all do what we can to mobilize our communities and get folks talking about this. It is time we demand action from our political and economic leaders commensurate with the urgency of the crisis.
As the article indicates, the source of this info is the journal Nature. Here are two articles from the source that I urge you to read: Climate Crunch, a Burden Beyond Bearing, and the editorial, Time to Act. If this doesn’t get us motivated, go look at your children or grandchildren, or any children you know and love. Do it for them.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Among the bought-and-paid-for politicians in Washington, DC, the Greedy Boys of Greenwich and the Wonder Boys of Wall Street, is there one human being in this “Axis of Arrogance and Greed” who will speak out for something other than their own selfish interests?
Who is going to stand up and speak out clearly, loudly and often as President Barack Obama is doing?
Many voices are needed now.
May 9th, 2009 at 4:47 am
Dear Margaret,
Thanks for all your morally courageous and intellectually honest efforts, even though approaching threats to human wellbeing and environmental health loom ominously before us. Imagine what would immediately occur of everyone followed your good example. In the face of such daunting global challenges as humanity faces in our time, it is so easy to curse the darkness and, by so doing, choose NOT to light candles, as you are doing. Keep light candles, Margaret.
Always,
Steve
May 9th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Dear Steve,
I have a grand-niece soon to be born. I will be her godmother. I have to light candles. I don’t have any choice. As Thomas Berry wrote in “The Great Work,” every generation is born to its mission, its task, its great work. We don’t choose it; it is what it is. This is our great work. We were born into it, whether we like it or not. We can deny and avoid it, or we can engage. I know where the first road leads.
Also, I keep finding other candles everywhere I go. We continue to draw light from one another.
Thanks for your support.
Margaret