Where are we heading? Can we avoid climate Armageddon?

These thoughts first coalesced into firm ideas in 2013 at which time I wrote them down, not knowing what to do with them or how to spread them.

Now, in 2017, I see that much of what I was afraid was going to happen back then is happening now.  So I offer you my thoughts and hope that they find a resonance with your own thinking. Please feel free to offer comments which I will publish only if the ideas presented are written courteously and with no ad hominem pejoratives. I know they will provoke some controversy, but that's what can promote dialogue.  Thanks for reading and commenting.

Jeff Segall

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2013

Mankind is unkind to mankind.  Those that drive our economy and who profit most from its excesses are so addicted to gathering wealth at whatever the cost, that they are driving the world as we know it toward eventual annihilation.  What compels them to do so? Most claim that climate change is not man-made. They repeat that to themselves and to one another so often that it becomes their mantra.  Others are not so sure, but still they persist. Their rationale is that if that happens, then by the time it does, they will be but bones and don't trouble themselves thinking about the destruction their profligacy is bringing down upon their descendents.

At some time in the not-so-distant future, all of us who live in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia will find ourselves entering a time of panic. A panic brought about by the natural reaction of our atmosphere to the chemical insults which our industries have hurled at it.  It is likely that those living in less industrialized countries whose environments are less immediately affected by the ravages of atmospheric pollution will have the greater chance of surviving this man-made Armageddon. 

World temperatures have become highly erratic.  Drought and wildfire are affecting broad areas of continents as widely separated as North America and Australia.  Crops are being dessicated and dependency upon the bounty of countries not yet so seriously affected will increase. Inevitably, this will lead to world food shortages, and countries, states, counties, cities and small towns will compete franticly with one another in an upward spiraling momentum of desperation. As water levels in lakes, reservoirs and the great rivers continue to decrease, and cracked, parched earth replaces the once cascading waters, uncontrollable forest fires will destroy the trees whose leaves replenish the oxygen levels of the planet, and the fires from the furnaces of factories and power plants will continue to spew their oxides of carbon and nitrogen, send the CO2 concentrations of our atmosphere soaring, and annual high temperatures rising correspondingly. 

In upheavals of desperation, those who manage and lead national governments will finally come to understand that the behaviors of the moguls of industry that they have not only condoned but encouraged have caused this approaching disaster, and they will compel power plants and factories to curtail and finally halt production. But this will come far too late to have any beneficial effect whatsoever. Those workers will be permanently furloughed and the unemployed, after all their resources have been exhausted, now unable to purchase whatever goods remain will become increasingly desperate. And they will find that there will be fewer and fewer goods until there are no goods at all to purchase even if one be a millionaire, because the stocks of gasoline that fuels delivery trucks that bring goods to market will have become exhausted.  Ships will no longer ply the waves bringing middle-eastern oil to refineries because there will be no diesel fuel to drive their engines. Ours will be a darkened world utterly devoid of electric power. 

In less than a decade, every store that once stocked warm clothing will have been ransacked. Clothing will eventually wear out; shoes will fall apart; there will be no heat to shelter us from the cold. Frigid winters will bring disease and early death to the weaker among us. Attempting to stay warm, resourceful city dwellers will find new sources of fuel.  They will turn to vandalism, destroying banisters, stairs, furniture, even housing whether abandoned or inhabited, anything that will burn. They will discover that pages of books will serve that purpose. Every bookstore and every library will be sacked for the fuel their books’ pages can provide. Food riots will eventually break out as masses of the starving flow through the streets, break into stores and storage tanks to drain what is left within.  Eventually nothing will remain within. Then those who still have comestibles will be set upon and frequently murdered by those whose food supplies have dwindled to nothing. 

A few brave individuals will try to reason with the masses, but their voices will be drowned out. Those living in warmer climates will survive a bit longer for not having frozen to death; but most will, in the end, starve to death.  A very few in the more temperate climes will migrate to wherever a little rain has fallen and will try to live off the land.  Some will survive; most will not.

There will come a time when the more industrious and hard-working among the tiny remnant will try to reconstruct from memory or from reasoning how to build rudimentary shelters, and ever so gradually, as the decades flow into centuries, the atmosphere will achieve some kind of homeostasis. Whether the oxygen/carbon dioxide/ozone balance will ever be restored to pre-20^th century levels is not knowable. Our civilization has probably unalterably changed that balance.  Time will tell, and perhaps the forces of evolution will enable our few surviving descendents to adapt to the new climate.  They will have a very long road to travel.

What advances and benefits will they possess – inherited from their ancestors?  Literacy, at least for some, will survive. Some will teach their young to read.  If any libraries remain, perhaps the more curious among the surviving remnant will be able to hasten the rebuilding of society. Those that can read and write will become the seed of the new leadership. Some leaders will be fair, benevolent and supportive. Other will become despots.  The illiterate will either admire their leaders or become jealous or distrustful of them.  Rancor will inevitably develop, and the cycle of history will resume.

The saddest part of this chain of events is that it is all so avoidable.  If we have the courage and the will to convince or compel our political leaders to rein in the excesses of the leaders of industry and to immediately take steps to decrease very significantly the poisonous effluents of our thousands upon thousands of smokestacks and tailpipes, then maybe, just maybe we can avoid the mayhem.

Is this wish just a pipedream? Can we do this? Do we have the will?  That is the challenge. We have to do this.  We have no choice. The alternative is too unbearable to contemplate.

It is now September 2017

The air in the states of Washington and California has been contaminated by the smoke of almost three dozen forest fires in California and Oregon.  By March of 2015, California had already been suffering from a deficit of over 11 trillion gallons of water. (source:  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-struggles-to-conserve-what-little-water-thats-left/)  

California has been suffering from a drought that started years ago and hasn't abated except when visited by a horrendous rain storm so strong that a huge landslide of mud cascaded down from the hills to block California's Pacific Coast Highway.  

Houston has been inundated by Hurricane Harvey,  the entire state of Florida is under immediate threat of inundation by Hurricane Irma. The Keys have been abandoned as has all of Miami Beach. Florida's governor has broadcast that no one in Miami Beach will survive the Hurricane once it hits. 

The islands of St. Maarten and Barbudo have been ravaged by that same hurricane; more than 95% of St. Maarten has been utterly destroyed.  Hurricanes Jose and Katia are headed across the Atlantic threatening to further drown the lives and hopes of millions of dwellers.  The size and strength of these hurricanes are all in categories 4 and 5 - even threatening to create a new Category 6.  And still, the Brobdingnagians and Yahoos of our nation, the uneducated and purely evil members of the self-serving Power Elite insist that Climate Change is a fiction, and persist in their belief that spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and ash particulates have nothing to do with the disasters being reported from around the world.  

We are edging closer and closer to a conclusion that was foreseeable in 2013.  And now our nation is governed by the very Power Elite that, in combination with the Chinese, the Brazilians and the Indians, is hastening the lemming-like march to extinction begun with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  Efforts to transfer to more efficient and renewable energy sources have been underfunded and sidelined by those in the fossil fuel industry with the most to lose monetarily should the oil and gas industries be replaced. 

Our President has taken us out of the Paris Climate Accord, and this has to be resisted by a huge upsurge in protest from Americans themselves. Who is there that is strong enough to steer this ship away from the whirlpool of disaster that is threatening to suck us all into its hungry maw? What are we going to do about it?  Is writing letters and signing petitions enough? What responsibility does each individual have to compel the government to enact legislation to curtail the blind and irresponsible march to doom?  Do we have the courage to act?  I am not advocating insurrection or revolution. But we have to make changes immediately to start to alter dramatically the course upon which this nation is headed.  Your thoughts?